Beyond linguistic competence: shifting classroom environments and motivational paths to foster self-regulated oral presentations—a theoretical framework development

Abstract

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.