Family support and online English learning effectiveness among Chinese university students: indirect associations through self-regulation and positive emotions.

BACKGROUND: Online English learning requires university students to manage learning activities across flexible and relatively less supervised digital environments. Although family support may represent a relevant distal socio-contextual resource, its associations with students' self-regulation, positive emotions, and evaluations of online English learning remain insufficiently understood. This study examined how family support was associated with Chinese university students' self-reported online English learning effectiveness, both directly and indirectly through self-regulation and positive emotions. METHODS: Drawing on social cognitive theory, self-regulated learning theory, and control-value theory of achievement emotions, the study used a cross-sectional online survey design. The analytic sample comprised 430 Chinese university students with prior university-level online English learning experience. The measurement and structural models were evaluated using structural equation modeling, and specific indirect associations were examined using 5,000 bootstrap resamples and bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals. RESULTS: Family support was positively associated with self-regulation, positive emotions, and self-reported online English learning effectiveness. Self-regulation was positively associated with both positive emotions and online English learning effectiveness, and positive emotions were positively associated with online English learning effectiveness. The indirect association between family support and online English learning effectiveness through self-regulation was statistically significant [estimate = 0.169, 95% BC CI (0.064, 0.315)]. The focused sequential indirect association through self-regulation and positive emotions was also statistically significant [estimate = 0.110, 95% BC CI (0.050, 0.200)], supporting the focused hypothesis. By contrast, the indirect association through positive emotions alone was not statistically significant [estimate = 0.046, 95% BC CI (-0.001, 0.141)]. The direct association between family support and online English learning effectiveness remained statistically significant. CONCLUSION: The findings identify self-regulation as a proximal regulatory process within the theory-specified model and indicate that positive emotions are relevant when considered alongside students' self-regulatory management of online learning. Family support was associated with students' evaluations of online English learning both directly and through specific regulatory and affective pathways. Because the study used cross-sectional self-report data and a non-probability sample, the findings should be interpreted as theory-consistent associations rather than evidence of temporal ordering or causal mediation.