When Learning in English Hurts: Five Psychological Profiles Reveal Hidden Struggles of Saudi Students

Every year, hundreds of thousands of students across the Arab world sit through lectures delivered entirely in English, a language that is often their second or third. The policy of English-medium instruction, or EMI, is promoted as a gateway to global knowledge and better careers, but a new study from Saudi Arabia suggests that the psychological cost of this arrangement is far more uneven than educators have assumed. Rather than treating all struggling students as roughly alike, the research reveals that unmet psychological needs combine in distinct patterns, and that the specific shape of that combination determines exactly which parts of a student’s life suffer most.

The study, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, was conducted by Ahmed Alharfi of Adelaide University and King Faisal University. It surveyed 607 undergraduates enrolled in English-medium instruction programmes in Saudi Arabia and applied a statistical technique known as latent profile analysis to their reports of frustration in three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These three needs sit at the heart of self-determination theory, one of the most influential frameworks in contemporary motivational psychology, which holds that human beings flourish when they feel volitional, capable, and connected, and wither when those experiences are blocked.

Most previous research in this tradition has treated each need as a separate continuous predictor, running statistical models that estimate the average effect of autonomy frustration, competence frustration, or relatedness frustration across a whole sample. That approach, the study argues, obscures something crucial: the way the three needs are configured within a single individual. A student who feels moderately thwarted across all three needs may be in a very different psychological position from one who feels acutely incompetent but socially supported, even if their total frustration scores look similar on paper. Person-centred analysis is designed to capture precisely this kind of heterogeneity.

The latent profile analysis yielded five distinct profiles. Two of them were large and differed mainly in overall severity: one group reported low frustration across all three needs, and another reported mild frustration across the board. These two groups together accounted for the majority of students, suggesting that for most undergraduates in EMI settings, the intensity of need frustration, rather than its pattern, is the main dimension of individual difference. In other words, most students sit along a single continuum running from relatively comfortable to moderately strained.

The remaining three profiles were smaller but configurally distinct, and this is where the findings become striking. One profile was characterised by pervasive and relational frustration, meaning students reported high frustration in relatedness alongside elevated levels elsewhere. A second profile showed acute competence frustration, a concentrated sense of being unable to meet academic demands. The third, described as a relatedness-spared agentic frustration, involved heightened frustration of autonomy and competence while the need for relatedness remained comparatively intact. These configurations could not have been detected by averaging scores across the sample.

The profiles differed substantially in three outcome domains: school belonging, personal wellbeing, and social wellbeing. Personal wellbeing was measured as a combination of emotional and academic functioning, while social wellbeing captured the quality of students’ interpersonal lives. Critically, the content of a student’s frustration corresponded to the domain most affected. Students in the profile marked by relatedness frustration reported the lowest social wellbeing, while those whose profiles were dominated by autonomy and competence frustration reported the lowest personal wellbeing. Belonging, the sense of being an accepted member of the academic community, also varied meaningfully across the five groups.

This alignment between the type of frustration and the type of impairment carries practical weight. If a student’s distress stems primarily from blocked competence, interventions targeting social connection may miss the mark; what that student needs is restored experiences of mastery and efficacy, perhaps through adjusted academic support or feedback practices. Conversely, a student whose relatedness is thwarted may be socially adrift even when academically confident, and would benefit from community-building rather than study skills. A one-size-fits-all wellbeing programme, the study implies, will inevitably serve some configurations of need frustration better than others.

Another notable result concerns who ends up in which profile. Membership was largely independent of gender, academic major, and the category of English exposure, suggesting that the psychological experience of studying through English does not sort itself neatly along these demographic lines. Only a weak association emerged with year of study, hinting that time in an EMI programme may modestly shape need frustration but is far from determinative. The frustration profiles, in other words, cut across the usual categories that universities use to identify at-risk groups, which means those categories may be poor guides for targeting support.

The context matters here. English-medium instruction has expanded rapidly across higher education systems where English is not the primary language of society, and Saudi Arabia is a prominent example. Students in these programmes must simultaneously master disciplinary content and navigate it through a language in which their sense of competence and autonomy can be fragile. The study’s findings suggest that this linguistic arrangement does not produce a uniform psychological burden; instead, it filters students into different configurations of need frustration, with a minority experiencing sharply patterned difficulties that differ qualitatively from the mild, general strain reported by the majority.

The author is careful to frame the work as a provisional, descriptive foundation rather than a definitive prescription. The profiles were identified in a single sample at a single point in time, and the associations between profile membership and wellbeing outcomes are correlational, leaving open questions about direction of causation. Still, the study offers universities a concrete starting point: screening that distinguishes severity from configuration could help institutions identify the smaller groups of students whose frustration is concentrated in particular needs, and direct them toward support matched to what is actually blocked. As EMI continues to spread globally, understanding not just how much students struggle, but in what specific way, may prove essential to protecting both their belonging and their wellbeing.

Subject of Research: Profiles of basic psychological need frustration and their links to belonging and wellbeing among Saudi undergraduates in English-medium instruction

Article Title: Profiles of basic psychological need frustration and their associations with belonging and wellbeing among Saudi undergraduates in English-medium instruction

Article References: Alharfi, A. (2026). Profiles of basic psychological need frustration and their associations with belonging and wellbeing among Saudi undergraduates in English-medium instruction. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09343-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09343-w

Keywords: self-determination theory, basic psychological needs, need frustration, English-medium instruction, Saudi Arabia, higher education, latent profile analysis, school belonging, student wellbeing, autonomy, competence, relatedness