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The movement towards digital learning and online interactions has brought us all together, virtually, sans international boundaries and on a rich multi-cultural interface. Thus, learning a language that is most acceptable in political and cultural communication across the globe becomes crucial for all aspects, be it studying (Behroozi and Amoozegar, 2014) or conducting business functions. Learning English language has always been a priority (Chen Hsieh, Wu and Marek, 2017) and the need to learn has only escalated in the present times (Jin, 2018; Lin, & Lin, 2019; Shadiev, Hwang, and Huang, 2017).
Apart from learning the basics, the major challenge in language learning lies in its application to various skills (Hwang et al., 2017) of listening, speaking, writing and reading. Another challenge is engaging students in a mutual learning process with peers and instructors from diverse nationalities (Liu et al., 2010). Digital technologies have led to changes in students' expectations and characteristics (Chuang, Weng, and Chen, 2018) and thus instructors are looking for innovative methods to make online English language learning a rich and meaningful experience.
However, the success of online English learning depends on a lot of factors. There may be factors that relate to the motivation of students, and there may be factors that demotivate a student to make the most of language learning. Previous studies have focussed on identifying such factors and classifying them under categories such as classroom factors, learner-centred and teacher-centred factors or alternatively - motivating (Ilter, 2009; Komlosi-Ferdinand, 2020) and demotivating factors (Meshkat and Hassani, 2012; Soureshjani and Riahipour, 2012; Al-Khairy, 2013). Less emphasis has been devoted to analysing the interrelationships between these factors. It is important to note that these factors are not independent but are often directly or indirectly related to each other. Their interplay can make or break the success of an online English language learning course (Zhang, Dai and Ardasheva, 2020). It hence becomes all the more necessary to conduct systematic research on the inter-relationships between these factors so that educators could develop effective and targeted measures to ensure its success in today's diverse online classroom.
The concepts of self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985; Ryan and Deci, 2017) provide a theoretical rationale for understanding these factors, the inter-relationships and how they can be integrated in pedagogy to provide a meaningful experience to students. Self-determination theory (SDT) is based on the belief that human motivation can take many forms depending upon the degree of relative autonomy or self-determination, and thus has been applied by many researchers to gain a better understanding of student motivation (Deci and Ryan, 2016). Individuals are driven by both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators; thus, it is useful to consider motivation on a continuum ranging from “non self-determined to self-determined”. The majority of the research has supported the assumption that autonomous forms of motivation towards self-determined can be associated with positive educational outcomes (Guay, Lessard, and Dubois, 2016). Most of the researchers have attempted to establish statistical relationships between these factors through examinations of correlations (Guay et al., 2015) or advanced methods of multiple regression (Litalien et al., 2017).