PONE-D-25-12036The Effects of Learning Experience on College Students' Deep English Learning: A Study of the Chain Mediation Effect of Motivation and StrategyPLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This study used a questionnaire survey and did not involve any procedures or operations that could harm participants' physical or mental health. The research attempts to examine the connection between learning experiences, motivations, tactics, and deep learning outcomes without harming individuals, sensitive information, or commercial interests. Good practice.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript entitled “The Effects of Learning Experience on College Students' Deep English Learning: A Study of the Chain Mediation Effect of Motivation and Strategy” employed cross-sectional data collected from college students with different social background. Results showed a positive effect of learning experience on English deep learning while motivation and learning strategies play important chain medicating role, according to the manuscript. After going through the manuscript, I suggest following changes/comments to be incorporated before the final decision.

Abstract should be rewritten while excluding redundant text and solely focusing on objectives, methods, data, results and conclusion. In the abstract, it is mentioned that college students of different genders, ages, educational backgrounds and academic achievement levels were selected as samples. This shows that different samples based on these social and academic achievement were considered in the manuscript. Here the question rises, age of the students may not be much different. How this problem was dealt? Further, why these different samples were considered? Whether the analysis was done on overall basis or sample based and comparison was made on college students of different gender, age, educational background and academic achievement. For the latter, the clarification be provided if the analysis was done on the different samples. Otherwise no reason for taking different samples. One more clarification needs to be provided about education background. Here the manuscript considers educational background of parents/family members or the students? In case of the students, whether the field of the study was considered or degree programs i.e. graduate and undergraduate. Research gap if any may be provided in the beginning of the abstract. Limitations and future research direction are usually not provided in the abstract rather these can be included discussion and or conclusion section.

PLOS One format for abstract be considered for the abstract and other sections of the manuscript.

Keywords should be different from those of title of the manuscript. Presently many keywords are given in the title.

Introduction section describes the importance of English in the present era for the personal development in the global world. Then it explains the role of learning experience in English deep learning. The manuscript claims that the literature on the subject under consideration is manuscript is rarely considered. Especially mediation chain effect is not considered. However, I could not understand whether the literature relating to the subject is scarce in the context of the globe or specific to a particular country, region or continent. Including this information will help understand the readers the purpose of the manuscript more clearly.

Here one can raise the questions whether the social, demographic and academic background differences exist in the study area under consideration? If yes, what are those ones and how the study team comes to know? How those differences matter in deep learning and medicating chain effect? One other point is that whether the students enrolled in English program or any programs were considered during the data collection? Even if the literature on the subject relating to the context is available, it should be cited properly. Presently it seems that no such literature is present, according to the manuscript. Without proper literature review, one can not provide rationale for the research gap and objectives of the manuscript.

The conceptual framework is smooth and provides useful insights on various hypotheses of the manuscript. Citations of the latest literature will further improve this section.

Research sample of 500 students were taken from comprehensive universities from Nanchang City, China. This section needs much improvement through various clarifications. First one is to clarify the meaning of comprehensive universities so the readers can easily understand the term comprehensive universities. First paragraph contains repetitions and it should be avoided throughout the manuscript. For example, it is enough to write that both undergraduate and postgraduate students are considered instead of further elaborating educational backgrounds i.e. bachelor, master, PhD, etc. Balanced gender ratio is considered. Here the question is whether both girls and boys make the same percentage (50:50) of total student population in the comprehensive universities? If not, then why the same ratio was taken in the sample? Proportionate sampling method would be better if the population is different for each gender. Different categories of the students such as year of the studies etc. were taken. Again population of each category may be different within and across the universities, how the appropriate sample size was decided? How the sample size of 500 was reached and how many universities were selected?

Whether the manuscript employed the questionnaire adopted from the literature or a new one was designed. If the new one was designed then reliability and validity of the questionnaire was carried out or not, this information is missing.

Table 1 is too much confusing and it should be reformatted and restructured. Second column showing form is difficult to understand. I could not understand age groups of 1820 years, 21265 years, etc. similarly technical students, undergraduate, etc. terms are difficult to be absorbed by the readers. A technical student can be of undergraduate or postgraduate. These categorizations are not clear. The tables must be self-explanatory and the readers can understand very easily without going through the text.

Statistical processing section provides information on statistical methods employed in the manuscript. It is mentioned that SPSS and AMOS are used to analyze the collected data for reliable and valid outcomes. The need is to provide the information on using these software for specific purpose. For example descriptive analysis was done through SPSS and SEM through AMOS, etc.

Consistency in citation of the literature is lacking in the manuscript. I suggest to follow the journal guidelines for the authors to cite the literature in the manuscript.

Significance of the results is shown through steric and p values, again consistency of providing the results is lacking. Even within the same table (Table 5), both steric and p-value are given.

Discussion section should compare findings with the previous studies instead of reproducing the results in this section.

Conclusions section is too lengthy and repetition of the above sections as already mentioned in my earlier comment. Rather it should be precise and address findings of the manuscript and implications rather providing importance of the topic, objective, etc.

References are numbered in the list. However, some sections of the manuscript have citations in the form of numbering, others with name. It confuses which citation should be followed. Again I suggest to go through the journal guidelines to rewrite references and citations in the manuscript.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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The Effects of Learning Experience on College Students' Deep English Learning: A Study of the Chain Mediation Effect of Motivation and Strategy

PONE-D-25-12036R1

Dear Dr. Jin,

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Kind regards,

Faisal Shafique Butt, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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