Pathways to Persistence: Extending the Role of Academic Resilience in Autonomous Supportive Teaching Environment

Autonomy-supportive teaching (AST) is widely recognised for enhancing student motivation, satisfaction, and engagement, particularly in foreign language learning contexts. However, the role of individual learner characteristics such as academic resilience (AR) in shaping these relationships remains underexplored. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the current study investigates academic resilience as both a mediator and moderator in the relationships between AST and key student outcomes that are learner satisfaction (LS), engagement (LE), and continuance intention (CI). Data were collected from 304 undergraduate students in India preparing for English-medium higher education. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was employed to analyse the data. Results confirmed that academic resilience significantly mediates the effects of AST on learner satisfaction and continuance intention, and fully mediates the indirect effect via satisfaction. However, a surprising pattern emerged in the moderation analysis, while AR positively strengthened the AST to satisfaction link, it negatively moderated the relationships between AST and both engagement and continuance intention. This suggests that highly resilient learners may derive less incremental benefit from autonomy support in terms of behavioural engagement and persistence, possibly because they are already self-sufficient. These findings challenge assumptions of universally positive effects of AST and highlight the importance of differentiated instructional strategies based on students’ resilience levels. The study contributes to SDT by integrating resilience as a dual-mechanism variable and offers practical insights for designing adaptive, resilience-informed EFL pedagogy.