Examining resilience in EFL contexts: a survey study of university students in China

Abstract

Abstract Resilience, a psychological individual difference variable, has not received adequate scholarly attention in education contexts. The present study investigated the resilience level among 273 university EFL learners in China with T.-Y. Kim and Kim’s (2017. The impact of resilience on L2 learners’ motivated behaviour and proficiency in L2 learning. Educational Studies 43(1). 1–15) scale, which comprised five sub-components of resilience in the Korean EFL context. Confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis showed that self-regulation, one sub-component identified in the Korean context, was also found in the factorial structure of resilience in the Chinese EFL context; accordingly, self-regulation was hypothesised to be a “Resilience Core” that can be found in different learning contexts. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the selected sociobiographical variables (e.g., a global measure of multilingualism, GMM) affected resilience and “Resilience Core” to varying degrees; for example, L2 joy (ΔR 2 = 14.2–23.3%) and GMM (2.9–7.8%) emerged as important predictors for resilience because their minimum ΔR 2 exceeded the “typical” effect size benchmark (1%).