Empowering Ethnic Minority Students’ Mobile English Learning: A Conceptual Framework for College English Courses in China

Abstract

College English (CE) is a compulsory, foundational course for most non-English majors in China, but its development continues to be shaped by exam-oriented assessment, large classes, and persistent tensions between communicative aims and local classroom realities. Within these structurally constrained conditions, efforts to integrate Mobile English Learning Resources (MELRs) often result in fragmented and uneven patterns of use, particularly in programmes that enrol high proportions of ethnic minority students. This conceptual paper proposes an integrated framework that combines the L2 Motivational Self System, Activity Theory, and agency–affordance perspectives to conceptualise how MELRs can be embedded within the CE activity system. The framework starts from the proposition that MELRs become motivationally powerful only when their affordances are actualised through direct personal, proxy, and collective agency under particular rules, communities, and division of labour. Ideal L2 Selves are treated as the psychological basis of agency, while the L2 Learning Experience is modelled through behavioural, cognitive, and emotional engagement along the Subject–Object pathway of the activity system. Activity Theory provides the structure for locating how agency operates within CE classrooms that serve ethnic minority students, and agency–affordance perspectives clarify when designed affordances are transformed into learner-actualised affordances for English learning. The paper outlines research directions and pedagogical implications that follow from this framework and presents it as an analytical lens for future empirical work on mobile-assisted English learning in CE contexts.