Exploring the interplay of attitudes: The transfer of self-efficacy and emotions between L1 Chinese and L2 English integrated writing contexts

In today's multilingual society, students often learn two or more languages simultaneously. Despite a wealth of research on writing attitudes, few studies have explored the relationship between student attitudinal variables from a cross-linguistic perspective, particularly in the field of integrated writing (IW). This study included 239 first-year English majors from a normal university in southeastern China. Path analysis revealed clear relationships between cognitive and affective attitudes, with self-efficacy being a significant negative predictor of anxiety (β = −0.391 for L1 and β = −0.258 for L2) and a positive predictor of enjoyment (β = 0.531 for L1 and β = 0.380 for L2), irrespective of the language. The study identified statistical evidence of transfers from L1 attitudes to L2 attitudes, across cognitive and affective attitudes, with various patterns. The study provides a cross-linguistic perspective on the relationship between L1 Chinese and L2 English IW attitudes in Chinese higher education and highlights the critical contribution of psychological transfer in compensating for the limitations of previous theories and empirical studies that focused solely on linguistic ability and writing strategy transfer.