Linking L2 mindsets, achievement emotions, and engagement to accomplishment: A PERMA+4 perspective on EFL well-being

With the rise of positive psychology, increasing attention has been directed toward the role of positive emotions in fostering personal growth and well-being in second and foreign language learning. Although the PERMA and PERMA+4 frameworks offer valuable perspectives on well-being, they primarily emphasize positive constructs, leaving negative emotions and fixed mindsets largely unexplored. This gap is significant, as both positive and negative emotions, as well as growth and fixed mindsets, jointly shape learners’ psychological experiences. This study examined the effects of growth and fixed language mindsets on university students’ sense of accomplishment in English learning, with positive and negative achievement emotions and student engagement serving as sequential mediators. Using a short-term longitudinal design, large-scale quantitative questionnaire data were collected at 3 time points over an 18-week semester from 501 university students in Taiwan to assess second-language (L2) mindsets (Time 1), achievement emotions (Time 2), and engagement and sense of accomplishment (Time 3). Descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and mediation analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS and AMOS. Structural equation modeling revealed that students with growth mindsets experienced stronger positive emotions, weaker negative emotions, greater engagement, and higher accomplishment in English learning. In contrast, fixed mindsets did not predict positive emotions or accomplishment but positively predicted negative emotions. Sequential mediation analyses showed that positive emotions and engagement together exerted the strongest indirect effect, followed by positive emotions alone and negative emotions combined with engagement. No mediating effects were found for fixed mindsets. These findings extend the PERMA+4 framework by highlighting the differential roles of adaptive and maladaptive emotions and mindsets in explaining well-being and accomplishment in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learning.