Beyond linguistic competence: shifting classroom environments and motivational paths to foster self-regulated oral...

Academic oral presentations have become a defining competency of higher education in the era of internationalized scholarship, demanding not only linguistic accuracy but also sophisticated self-regulated learning capacities. However, despite the growing recognition of self-regulated learning as a critical mechanism in second/foreign language acquisition, educational psychology research has been disproportionately preoccupied with receptive skills such as reading, while productive oral skills-particularly the high-stakes, performance-laden context of academic oral presentations-have remained theoretically underdeveloped. Moreover, while individual differences in motivation and anxiety have received substantial attention, the role of the immediate classroom environment in shaping students' self-regulated learning has remained peripheral, and the mediating mechanisms through which environmental factors translate into strategic behavior have not been adequately theorized. To bridge these gaps, this paper develops a theoretical framework articulating how Chinese college English learners' perceived classroom environment shapes their self-regulated learning strategy use in academic oral presentations through motivational beliefs. Drawing on the social-cognitive perspective and on motivational theories of expectancy-value, self-efficacy, and achievement goals, the framework conceptualizes classroom environment along two dimensions-instructional practices (presentation task design, process-oriented teacher support, study autonomy) and social support (teacher and peer social support)-and posits five motivational beliefs (utility value, intrinsic interest, self-efficacy, mastery goals, and performance goals) as mediators. We propose that (a) presentation task design and process-oriented teacher support exert direct effects on strategy use, while study autonomy operates indirectly via intrinsic interest; (b) teacher social support exerts broad multi-path indirect effects via several motivational beliefs, whereas peer social support, owing to the audience-evaluator duality unique to oral presentations, operates through a reconfigured set of motivational pathways centered on self-efficacy and utility value; and (c) the Confucian Heritage Culture context of Chinese higher education moderates these pathways in distinctive ways. This reconfigured framework generates testable propositions for future empirical inquiry, advances self-regulated learning theory into the productive oral domain, and informs the design of motivationally responsive pedagogy.