A Case Study Of A Novice University EFL Teacher's Emotion Regulation In Classroom Teaching

Emotion regulation in classroom teaching has drawn attention in the field of teacher professional development.Previous empirical studies mainly concern teachers'emotion regulation strategies and effects in their whole teaching life,but few examine teachers' real-time emotion regulation experiences and influencing factors in the classroom context.This qualitative study explores a Chinese novice university EFL teacher's emotion regulation experiences in a graduate course,and identifies the situational emotion regulation strategies and effects,as well as the influencing factors Data sources include classroom observation with video recording,retrospective interviews and case documents.Three major findings are summarized as followsFirstly,the novice teacher constantly regulated the self-and student-elicited emotions in various classroom situations.While teaching,the teacher tended to elicit and utilize both his positive and negative emotions for the teaching goals.During the classroom interactions,the teacher managed to regulate his negative emotions elicited from students' undesirable performance.Nonetheless,in some tough situations that couldn't be settled on the spot,the teacher experienced difficulty managing his emotions.These rich emotion regulation experiences reflect the complex and dynamic process of teacher emotion regulation in the classroom teaching,which is rarely seen in the existing literatureSecondly,the novice teacher used two categories of emotion regulation strategies in the classroom teaching.The more frequently used strategy is response-focused emotion regulation,including genuine expression,suppression,exaggeration,and faking.The other is antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategy,including situation modification,cognitive change and situation selection.These strategies produced positive effects on the teacher's teaching practice,including enhancing students'confidence and interest as well as reminding the students of their undesirable performance.Concerning the effects on the teacher's well-being,the strategies of genuine expression and cognitive change contributed prominently to the teachers' job satisfaction,while those of suppression and faking led to his emotional exhaustionThirdly,the study reveals personal and contextual factors that influenced the novice teacher's emotion regulation in the classroom teaching.The teacher's beliefs about student-centered teaching,student-teacher relationships and self-image are major determinants of his emotion regulation,while the educational and research experiences are key facilitators for his emotion regulation.As for the contextual factors,the curriculum design and the school administration invoked the teacher's negative emotions and had lingering effects on his emotion regulation.The educational culture differences between East and West,in terms of the role of teachers and student-teacher relationships,also challenged him to seek a balance of managing his emotions in the classroom teachingBased on the above findings,this study provides some implications for novice university EFL teachers,teacher educators and school administrators.It is suggested that novice EFL teachers learn to improve their emotion regulation skills through further study,teacher educators provide courses on emotion regulation in training programs,and school administrators create a more supportive work environment to improve novice teachers' well-being.