**1. Introduction**

Posing various obstacles to learners, second/foreign language (SL/FL) learning is far more complicated than first language acquisition. As a consequence, learners inevitably experience a myriad of emotions when learning a SL/FL, which is especially true for adults in the process of becoming bilingual. Negative emotions, such as anxiety, anger, disgust, boredom, scare, and hostility [1], due to their

primarily debilitating effects on learners' learning outcomes, have long caught the attention of researchers in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) [2]. In particular, anxiety has been much researched in SLA since the 1970s [2–5], which shows that speaking is the most anxiety-provoking SL/FL learning activity [2, 5]. Consequently, a large body of research has been done on speaking anxiety in SLs/ FLs [2, 6–11], most of which focuses on speaking for general purposes in bilingual students. As English has become the leading language in academia, students of higher education, especially postgraduate students, desire to be proficient in speaking English for academic purposes so that they can be better involved in academic activities such as classroom discussions, conference presentations, seminar presentations and oral research proposal defenses. Obviously, this could be far more challenging and anxiety-provoking. Yet, not much research is available on anxiety in bilingual learners when learning academic oral English [12].

Likewise, learning motivation has proved to be a facilitator in SL/FL learning and interacts with many other factors like anxiety, confidence, learning strategies, task difficulty and so on [13–17]. Nevertheless, as important concepts and components of learning motivation, expectancy-value beliefs have not been adequately researched [12, 13]. Even scarcer studies can be found on the interaction between expectancy-value beliefs and anxiety in bilingual students when learning the second language for academic purposes [12]. For these reasons, the present study aimed to examine the interaction between expectancy-value beliefs and anxiety in bilingual Chinese postgraduates when learning academic oral English, hoping to better the teaching and learning of academic oral communication to bilingual students.
