A Study On The Changes Of English Majors’ Academic Emotions In Classroom From The Perspective Of Dynamic Systems Theory

Academic emotions refer to the emotions that are directly related to students’ academic achievement and so on in educational environment.Recently,a growing number of scholars have attached importance to the study of academic emotions,and the relevant researches have been conducted from the static perspective,adopting the research instruments as questionnaire and interview.However,academic emotions are dynamic,and the studies involved in the changes of academic emotions remain rather limited.The emergence of dynamic systems theory(DST)and its research approaches provide the theoretical and practical possibility for exploring the changes of academic emotions.From the perspective of DST and the “idiodynamic method”,the present study employs the classroom video,Anion Variable Tester(AVT)software,think-aloud protocols and the moving min-max graph as instruments to explore the changes of four English majors’ academic emotions from the micro perspective(one class)and macro perspective(one semester)and the influencing factors under the classroom environment of a Content-Based Instruction(CBI)course,British History and Culture.The results were concluded as follows: firstly,based on the DST,the changes of English majors’ academic emotions reflected the following characteristics with regards to the micro perspective: academic emotions dynamically changed with three teaching arrangements;academic emotions had interconnectedness with students’ cognition of textbook;as an open system,academic emotions were influenced by the factors in classroom environment;the initial conditions,such as personality,English proficiency and so on,had impact on the changes of students’ academic emotions;academic emotions could self-organize into attractor states and repeller states,for example,student was in positive academic emotions,which was in attractor states,but positive academic emotions changed to negative academic emotions,which was in repeller states.Secondly,based on the DST,the changes of English majors’ academic emotionsindicated the following characteristics from the macro perspective: academic emotions changed differently over time and with content for the same teaching arrangement;the initial conditions of students,such as the knowledge reservation,had impact on the changes of academic emotions;due to the self-organization,academic emotions had the corresponding changes of attractor states and repeller states;academic emotions were feedback sensitive and adaptive;because of the characteristic of openness,classroom environmental factors had significant influence on the changes of academic emotions.Thirdly,the influencing factors in classroom environment manifested as follows:from the perspective of the classroom content,it included the form and content of students’ presentation,and teaching arrangements,teaching content and textbook in content and language instruction.From the part of teacher,the influencing factors were the teacher’ s feedback and teacher’ s expectation.When it came to the aspect of students,the influencing factors were mainly about the speech rate of the presenters,the students’ competition and teacher-student relation.The results of present study seem to reflect that English majors experience more positive academic emotions than the negative academic emotions in content and language instruction of the CBI course,British History and Culture,to a certain degree.In addition,the present study contributes to explore the moment-to-moment changes of English majors’ academic emotions in classroom environment,enrich the empirical study of academic emotions and also testify the applicability of dynamic systems theory and its research methods in emotion research.