Emotional Anxiety, Frustration of Failure and the Chain Mediating Effect of Project-Based Learning Performance

Anxiety is one of the greatest emotional obstacles in language learning. College English teaching has shifted from focusing on external factors such as the improvement of teaching hardware facilities to focusing on learners' language learning awareness, language psychological changes, language cognitive ability, and language emotional performance.

This study was carried out on a sample of 318 Chinese undergraduates. This paper suggests that emotional anxiety is a key factor leading to low language learning efficiency and has a negative impact on project-based learning performance. Then two variables: frustration of failure and learning satisfaction, are introduced, and a multi-chain mediating model is established to explore the transmission mechanism of emotional anxiety and learning performance.

With the increase of emotional anxiety, students' learning performance will be significantly affected in the process of project-based learning, and the results verify the negative relationship between anxiety and learning acquisition. Three paths that affect emotional anxiety on learning performance are identified, namely, "Emotional Anxiety -- Frustration of Failure -- Learning Satisfaction -- Learning Performance", "Emotional Anxiety -- Frustration of Failure -- Learning Performance" and "Emotional Anxiety -- Learning Satisfaction -- Learning Performance".

English learning is not only a process of language cognition, but also a process of psychological changes in learners. The achievement of learning performance is not only affected by language characteristics, students' cognitive ability, and learning environments, but also by non-intellectual factors such as learning attitude, learning motivation and emotions.