Pre-service English Teachers' Emotional Experience And Emotion Regulation Strategies During Teaching Practicum:A Case Study

For quite a long time,influenced by traditional positivist philosophy,great attention has been paid to teachers' profession knowledge and teaching practice while teacher emotion was ignored in foreign language teacher education.As an internal impetus for teacher behavior,teacher emotion is the driving force for teachers' professional development that can profoundly affect teachers' self-efficacy and identity formation,thus playing an important role both in teachers' professional development and students'development.During teaching practicum,pre-service teachers play the dual roles of both"learner" and "teacher",thus the complex emotions they experience during teaching practicum have a strong impact on their professional development.Compared with pre-service teachers in other disciplines,pre-service English teachers may experience more pressure and challenges during teaching practicum due to the particularity of the teaching language and teaching content,which determines the specialty of pre-service English teachers' emotions.Based on the ecological dynamics perspective,this study employed case study method to explore the emotional experience,influencing factors,and emotion regulation strategies of two pre-service English teachers during teaching practicum in a senior high school through reflection diaries,interviews,and classroom observation.Three research questions are addressed in this study,including:(1)what emotions did pre-service English teachers experience during teaching practicum?(2)What factors led to those emotional experiences during teaching practicum?(3)What emotion regulation strategies did pre-service English teachers employ during teaching practicum?Research findings show the following aspects:(1)Pre-service English teachers experienced positive,negative,and mixed emotions during teaching practicum.They experienced negative emotions at most,including pressure,confusion,frustration unhappiness and disappointment.They also experienced positive emotions such as happiness,sense of accomplishment,excitement,incentive,love and expectation.And also they experienced mixed emotion:pain and happiness.(2)The factors attributed to pre-service English teachers' emotions mainly originated from two aspects:one is personal factors,including pre-service English teachers' teaching beliefs,self-identity and teaching practice;the other is environmental factors,including pre-service English teacher's interaction with students,mentors and peers within microsystem;the relationship between peers and students,and the interaction between the institution and practicum school within mesosystem;factors in exosystem such as internship conditions and the status of English subjects in practicum;the reform of English college entrance examination questions in macrosystem.Among them,the microsystem and mesosystem are more closely related to pre-service English teachers,thus becoming the most important source of environmental factors that affect the emotion of pre-service English teachers;(3)Pre-service English teachers mainly used two types of emotion regulation strategies during teaching practicum.One is response-focused emotion regulation strategy which includes specific strategies of adaptation,expression suppression,relaxation,communication and self-strengthening.The other is antecedent-focused strategy which involves cognitive restructuring,lowering expectations,concentration,and isolation.During the teaching practicum,pre-service English teachers use response adjustment strategies more often.Based on the research findings,this study draws the following implications.First of all,pre-service teachers should exert their initiative to learn and master a variety of emotion regulation strategies in order to manage their emotions effectively and conduct emotion regulation strategies to adjust their emotions timely;secondly,the administrators and mentors in practicum school should pay attention to the emotional changes of pre-service English teachers and the various environmental factors affecting their emotions,and then strive to create a favorable internship conditions and atmosphere for pre-service teachers,empowering them and conducting equal dialogue so as not to give them feeling of outsiders in particular.Thirdly,teacher educators and policy-makers can set up courses related to teacher emotion,helping pre-service teachers to master some emotion regulation strategies and then use them in teaching practice.