Empowering academic communication in EMI higher education: Understanding the role of social-emotional need satisfaction in motivation and willingness to communicate

Academic communication through a second/foreign language (L2) can generate much stress for students that may hamper their willingness to communicate (WTC) and motivation for learning. Guided by Collie's (2022) framework of social-emotional need satisfaction, this mixed-methods study investigates how satisfying students' basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness affected their motivation and WTC at an English-medium instruction (EMI) university in China. Students' motivation was conceptualized through the notion of ideal self to include an ideal L2 self and an ideal disciplinary self to represent their desired future self-images as a competent English user and a successful subject expert, respectively. Quantitative results from structural equation modeling of questionnaire responses (N = 746) revealed that satisfying students' needs of autonomy and competence significantly predicted ideal L2 self and WTC, whereas the need of relatedness only predicted ideal disciplinary self. Qualitative analysis of interview data (N = 13) further illustrated distinct influential pathways of satisfying different needs on students' motivation and WTC, situated in specific academic communicative activities. Pedagogical implications are offered to the design of macro-level program, meso-level curriculum, and micro-level classroom teaching to support students' social-emotional needs, foster motivation, and improve WTC for academic communication in EMI higher education.