EFL Teachers’ Emotion Regulation In Teaching Practice

Although teacher emotion has entered the popular pedagogical imagination,with special journal issues,conferences,and textbooks,there is still relatively less research in the emotional experiences and emotion regulation strategies of EFL teachers.Drawing upon the approach of narrative study with data collection from multiple rounds of interviews,field observations and document analysis,this study looks into how EFL teachers perceive their emotions and what strategies they use to regulate their own emotions in the context of China.The findings of the study show that the middle school foreign language teachers in this study experience positive,negative and mixed emotions in their teaching life and they mainly use two types of strategies to regulate their emotions,namely,response-focused strategies,which include adaptation,taking action,communication,and releasing;and antecedent-focused strategies,which include cognitive restructuring,lowering expectations,attention conversion,and separating.This study contributes to the theoretical construction of research on EFL teachers’ emotions.It also offers some practical implications for both foreign language teachers and decision makers in middle school education on how to help teachers create favorable teaching environment in order to support their professional practice and development.