From support and interaction to continuance: affective pathways and the bright side of cognitive load in English-medium instruction.

English-medium instruction (EMI) is increasingly adopted in higher education, yet learners differ in their willingness to persist in EMI courses. While prior research has highlighted the cognitive and emotional demands of EMI learning, the relationships among these demands, learners' affective evaluations, and their continuance intention remain insufficiently examined. Guided primarily by expectation-confirmation logic and supplemented by positive emotion and cognitive load perspectives, this study examines an affective-cognitive model linking perceived support, perceived interaction, learning enjoyment, learning satisfaction, cognitive load, and continuance intention in EMI learning. Survey data were collected from 320 university students enrolled in EMI courses, and the proposed model was tested using structural equation modeling. The findings indicate that perceived support and perceived interaction are associated with distinct affective pathways. Perceived support is directly associated with learning satisfaction, reflecting learners' evaluative judgments of their overall learning experience, whereas perceived interaction is primarily related to learning enjoyment as an affective response to interactive EMI learning experiences. Learning enjoyment is positively associated with learning satisfaction, which emerges as the most proximal predictor of continuance intention. In addition, cognitive load positively moderates the relationship between learning enjoyment and learning satisfaction, indicating that enjoyment is more strongly related to satisfaction when learners report higher cognitive load. By conceptualizing learning satisfaction as an affective evaluation mechanism rather than a terminal outcome, this study clarifies the structural role of satisfaction in continuance intention in EMI learning. The findings suggest that, rather than simply reducing difficulty, effective EMI design should align instructional support and interaction with learners' affective evaluations in cognitively demanding EMI contexts.