Pre-service EFL teachers’ emotional experiences, emotion regulation strategies and influencing factors in research: A Chinese case study
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Currently, teacher emotion in the context of conducting research has drawn much attention in the field of teacher development. However, existing empirical studies mainly focus on in-service teachers' emotional experiences in conducting research, thus overlooking pre-service teachers. This study involving seven pre-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers from a comprehensive university in mainland China as participants adopts a qualitative method to explore their emotional experiences, emotion regulation strategies and influencing factors in research. The first major finding is that the participants experienced positive, negative and complex emotions throughout their research journeys. The negative emotions left the deepest impression, with confusion being the most common emotion. Second, the participants employed both antecedent-focused and response-focused strategies to regulate their negative emotions and sustain the positive ones, but they favored the response-focused strategies. The antecedent-focused strategies included attention deployment, cognitive change, separation, expectation lowering and situation selection, while response-focused strategies cover communication, self-improvement, action taking, relaxation, adaptation and expressive suppression. Third, both personal and environmental factors played a part in the participants' emotion regulation in conducting research. Personal factors included participants' past experiences, agency, and personality, while environmental factors included relationships with others and the research support they received. The findings have some implications which may be helpful for pre-service EFL teachers, educators and policy makers in conducting and supervising research.
Source: Heliyon
Authors: Renquan Heng, Qi Cheng, Liping Pu, Qingyu Tang
Institutions: Soochow University, Beijing Normal University
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,100
OpenAlex ID: W4401884049