This study investigated the relationship between teacher support in the areas of learner autonomy, relatedness, and competence, and motivational beliefs regarding achievement goal orientations and perceived task value in Chinese EFL college classrooms based on self-determination theory. A questionnaire was administered to 712 college students, and the data were analyzed using SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0. The findings indicated that teacher support for autonomy, relatedness, and competence was positively correlated with mastery goal orientation and performance-approach orientation, while it was negatively correlated with performance-avoidance orientation. Furthermore, these forms of teacher support positively influenced students’ perceived task value. Achievement goal orientation mediated the relationship between the three types of teacher support and student engagement. However, perceived task value only mediated the relationship between teacher autonomy support and student engagement. This study offers valuable insights for enhancing English teaching practices by promoting student motivation through addressing their psychological needs in EFL college classrooms.

This paper explores a college EFL course designed to practice reading for pleasure during the pandemic. Sixty EFL college learners in a required English course read Mark Haddon’s (2004) [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time] within the structure of a regular reading and writing focused academic English course. Reading for pleasure is often considered unfit for inclusion in regular curriculum. Nevertheless, for digital natives, the act of pleasurable reading especially in L2, should be actively implemented into classroom activities. This study follows a case study which practices reading for pleasure by utilizing weekly quizzes, discussion questions and response paper. Students’ feedback was collected and analyzed in order to share students’ experiences in completing the tasks. The feedback shows how weekly quizzes and class discussions have encouraged them to continue reading the text, influenced their attitude on reading English books and how they were able to empathize with the characters. This paper invokes the need to include reading young adult literature into general English courses for college learners to make them lifelong readers of L2.