The relationship between college students' English learning enjoyment, anxiety, and engagement: the mediating role of grit and the moderating role of flow.

Background: Learning engagement is a key indicator of college English learning quality. In the Chinese EFL context, engagement is closely related to learning emotions, psychological resources, and situational learning states. This study examined learning enjoyment, learning anxiety, grit, flow, and learning engagement within a Control-Value Theory framework. Method: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 875 Chinese college students. Standardized questionnaires assessed learning enjoyment, learning anxiety, grit, flow, and learning engagement. Data were analyzed using SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0. Results: Learning enjoyment was positively associated with learning engagement, whereas learning anxiety was negatively associated with it. Grit was a significant mediator in both associations. Flow moderated the associations between enjoyment and grit, enjoyment and engagement, anxiety and grit, and anxiety and engagement, but not the grit-engagement pathway. At higher levels of flow, the positive associations involving enjoyment were stronger, whereas the negative associations involving anxiety were weaker. Conclusion: This study extends Control-Value Theory by integrating emotional experiences, trait-like psychological resources, and situational cognitive-affective states. The non-significant flow × grit interaction help clarify the boundary conditions of flow, suggesting that flow may be more relevant to emotion-sensitive pathways than to the stable grit-engagement pathway. The findings suggest that college English teaching should attend to positive emotional experiences, anxiety-related difficulties, grit, and flow-supportive learning conditions.