Exploring the hierarchical antecedents of willingness to communicate and its relationship with utterance fluency in learning Chinese as a foreign language

Abstract Informed by the willingness to communicate (WTC) model, this study investigated the hierarchical antecedents of WTC and its relationship with utterance fluency in the context of learning Chinese as a foreign language (L2 Chinese). Data were collected from 236 L2 Chinese learners who completed a questionnaire and an L2 Chinese speech competence test. Of these participants, 94 also completed an L2 Chinese speech performance test. The results revealed that L2 Chinese WTC could be hierarchically subject to linguistic (i.e., speech competence), psychological (i.e., speaking anxiety, speaking motivation, and speaking self-efficacy), and sociocultural (i.e., attitudes toward the target language’s society, culture, and classroom instruction) factors as its high-evidence antecedents. The study also found that L2 Chinese WTC did not significantly contribute to any of the four fine-grained measures of utterance fluency (i.e., speech rate, pruned speech rate, articulation rate, and pruned articulation rate). The study concludes with pedagogical insights for teachers.