Multilingualism, multicultural personality, and foreign language anxiety as predictors of Chinese international students’ intercultural willingness to communicate

Intercultural willingness to communicate (IWTC) is essential to an individual’s success in intercultural communication. However, few studies investigated the factors that influence IWTC. This study examined the predictive effects of multilingualism, multicultural personality traits (i.e. social initiative, open-mindedness, cultural empathy, flexibility, and emotional stability), and foreign language anxiety (FLA) on the IWTC of Chinese international students studying abroad. The participants were 545 Chinese university students studying at 26 countries. Correlation analysis revealed that multilingualism, social initiative, open-mindedness, and cultural empathy were positively correlated with IWTC, whereas FLA and flexibility were negatively correlated. We then conducted multiple regression analysis and dominance analysis to examine the relative importance of the significant predictor variables in predicting the IWTC. Dominance analysis showed that social initiative, open-mindedness, and cultural empathy were the top three important and positive predictive variables, followed by multilingualism, whereas FLA had a significant but weaker negative effect. These results suggest that social-perceptual traits (i.e. social initiative, open-mindedness, and cultural empathy) and language experience-related variables (i.e. multilingualism and FLA) are important individual difference factors affecting IWTC. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.