Cadets’ Psychological Needs Satisfaction and AI Literacy in EFL: The Mediating Role of Writing Motivation

Abstract

The growing importance of AI literacy within education context has prompted questions regarding the psychological factors that support its development in EFL contexts, particularly in a military-style higher education, where such relationships remain underexplored. Framed within Self-Determination Theory, this study investigates the levels of cadets’ basic psychological needs satisfaction, writing motivation and AI literacy. It further examines the relationships between psychological needs satisfaction, writing motivation, and AI literacy, and probes the mediating role of writing motivation. A quantitative design was employed involving 69 third-year police cadets enrolled in an English language course. Spearman’s rank-order correlation and mediation analysis using PROCESS Model 4 with 5,000 bootstrap samples were utilized to analyze the data. The findings revealed cadets demonstrated high levels of basic psychological needs satisfaction, writing motivation and AI literacy. Additionally, significant positive correlations were found among the variables (rₛ = .453–.594, p < .001), and writing motivation partially mediated the relationship between psychological needs satisfaction and AI literacy (indirect effect = 0.1738, 95% CI [0.0573, 0.3285]). These results suggest that fulfillment of psychological needs plays an important role in enhancing student motivation and, in turn, promotes AI literacy in EFL learning environments.