“You women are so strange”: moderated mediation analysis of the link between Conscientiousness and L2 willingness to communicate

Abstract The study aimed to address a research gap pertaining to establishing the role of personality traits in foreign language learning. Particularly, the aim of this paper was to examine the link between the personality trait of Conscientiousness and the L2 willingness to communicate, when mediated by language anxiety, and moderated by gender. The participants were 590 secondary school students whose responses to a questionnaire allowed to test a moderated mediation model, assessing language anxiety as a mediator, and gender as a moderator in the Conscientiousness-L2 WTC link. The established results suggest that the positive link between Conscientiousness and L2 WTC is slightly weakened with the mediation of language anxiety, being negatively related to language anxiety, that, in turn, negatively predicts L2 WTC. Moreover, the link under consideration is strongly moderated by gender, which proves that conscientious females are more willing to communicate in a foreign language, in spite of the influence of language anxiety. This research can be regarded a significant step towards a better understanding of the direct and indirect effect of personality traits on FL-specific factors.