As a relatively new dimension of student engagement, agentic engagement has received growing research interest in recent years, as it not only predicts academic achievement and other positive outcomes, but also benefits reciprocal teacher-student relations. In the educational context, teachers' teaching style exerts a crucial impact on students' engagement. However, research on how perceived teachers' teaching style influences students' agentic engagement is inconclusive. To address this lacuna, this study, taking an integrated perspective that draws on Self-determination Theory and Achievement Goal Theory, investigated the relationship of three types of teaching style (i.e., perceived autonomy support, social relatedness, and controlling) to university students' agentic engagement in EFL learning in China, especially through the mediation of mastery-approach goals and performance approach goals. Structural equation modeling showed that perceived autonomy support positively predicted agentic engagement through the mediation of mastery-approach goals, whereas perceived controlling negatively predicted agentic engagement through the mediation of performance-approach goals. Comparatively, the relationship of perceived social relatedness to agentic engagement was fully mediated by both mastery-approach and performance-approach goals. After discussing these results, practical implications as well as suggestions for future studies were given.

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To promote English learning is an alleged benefit of implementing English-medium-instruction (EMI). However, English learning is supposed to occur incidentally in most EMI contexts. From the linguistic-ecological perspective, incidental language learning is premised on two conditions: linguistic inputs are perceived by learners as affordances, namely, perceived opportunities for action provided by the environment, and learners are excising their agency to engage with these affordances and the learning environment. Despite a substantial body of research investigating various aspects of EMI, there is a scarcity of research on students' perceptions of EMI classroom activities and teachers' instructional language use as English learning affordances, the manifestation of their agency and its mediating factors. Drawing on the ecological concepts of 'affordance' and 'agency' , this study intends to fill this void using a mixed methods design. One EMI teacher and 134 students in a Chinese university were involved as participants. Data were collected primarily through classroom observation, a questionnaire, and interviews over a 2-month period. Findings show that activities that required students' active engagement proved to be affordances perceived more positively. The manifestation and development of English learning agency were varied and personalised, mediated by both contextual and individual factors. Implications are also discussed.

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