Unlocking potential: language mindsets, psychological well-being, and English achievement among Chinese higher vocational students.

This cross-sectional study examined how language mindset beliefs are associated with psychological well-being and English achievement among Chinese higher vocational students, an underrepresented population in educational psychology. A total of 1,030 students from a private vocational and technical university completed the PERMA-Profiler and Language Mindset Inventory and reported their latest College English Test Band 4 (CET-4) score. Spearman rank-order correlations, regression-based moderation analysis with heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors, Mann-Whitney U tests, and Kruskal-Wallis H tests were used. Growth language mindset (GLM) was strongly associated with overall psychological well-being (rs  = 0.589), with its strongest observed PERMA subscale associations involving meaning (rs  = 0.583), accomplishment (rs  = 0.568), and engagement (rs  = 0.542). Fixed language mindset (FLM) showed weaker associations with positive PERMA subscale scores and its strongest association was with negative emotion (rs  = 0.408). CET-4 scores were only weakly associated with well-being (rs  = 0.110), GLM (rs  = 0.127), and FLM (rs  = -0.080). Neither the well-being × GLM nor the well-being × FLM interaction was significant, indicating no evidence that either language mindset factor moderated the association between well-being and CET-4 achievement. Demographic differences in CET-4 achievement by gender, only-child status, and hometown locale were statistically significant but small; male students also reported slightly higher FLM scores than female students. These findings suggest that the two theory-grounded LMI composite scores are more closely related to learners' psychological functioning than to standardized English achievement, although their current-sample structural distinctiveness should be interpreted cautiously.