Impostor Phenomenon and L2 willingness to communicate: Testing communication anxiety and perceived L2 competence as mediators

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Kay Brauer¹  Elyas Barabadi²  Elham Aghaee²  Fakieh Alrabai³  Majid Elahi Shirvan²  Rebekka Sendatzki¹  Linnea Marie Vierow¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg;Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bojnord;Department of English, Faculty of Languages and Translation, King Khalid University

关键词: Impostor phenomenon;    second language;    Willingness to communicate;    Anxiety;    competence;    Communication anxiety;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1060091

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The Impostor Phenomenon (IP) describes experiences of perceived intellectual fraudulence despite the existence of objectively good performances, and it is a robust predictor of experiences and outcomes in higher education. We examined the role of the IP in the domain of second language (L2) acquisition by testing its relations with a robust predictor of L2 use, willingness to communicate (WTC). We collected self-reports of 400 adult Iranian L2 learners and tested the associations between the IP and WTC. As expected, we found a negative association between IP and WTC (r = -.13). When testing a mediation model with perceived competence and communication anxiety as parallel mediators, we found evidence for full mediation via perceived competence. Our findings show the importance of considering self-evaluations in the domain of L2 acquisition. Further implications and limitations are discussed.

【 授权许可】

CC BY