The burgeoning development of artificial intelligence in language education has yet to fully address motivational and affective complexities shaping digital language learning engagement among multilingual young people in under-representative Global South contexts. Employing a structural equation modeling approach, this study surveys 369 Pakistani tertiary multilingual (Punjabi-Urdu-English) young people to explore the predictive impacts of a growth second-language mindset and second-language emotions on artificial intelligence-mediated informal digital learning of English engagement. The research findings reveal that participants’ growth second-language mindset positively and significantly predicts their sense of enjoyment, whereas their growth second-language mindset lacks predictive power over second-language anxiety and boredom. The results also demonstrate that participants’ second-language enjoyment can partially mediate the association between the growth second-language mindset and artificial intelligence-mediated informal digital learning of English engagement and simultaneously make a positive and direct impact on artificial intelligence-mediated informal digital learning of English engagement. Drawing on these quantitative insights, this study offers pedagogical implications, particularly in terms of sustaining the context-specific and multilingual young people to engage with artificial intelligence-mediated digital learning activities beyond the classroom while mobilizing affective dimensions at the crossroads of artificial intelligence technologies affordances and global English.
Zou et al. (Thu,) studied this question.