A Case Study On Emotion Regulation Strategies Of Novice English Teachers In Junior High School Y

“Professional Standards for junior high school Teachers” proposes that junior high school teachers should be “good at self-regulating emotions and maintaining a peaceful state of mind”.Teacher’s work itself is an emotional practice,bearing a lot of emotional labor,teachers will inevitably produce emotions in the process of education and teaching.Novice teachers who have been working for 1-5 years need to adapt to the unfamiliar workplace environment,get familiar with the subject knowledge content,and most importantly,handle the interpersonal relationship with the surrounding environment well.Many factors lead to complex emotion experience for novice teachers.If novice teachers do not properly use emotion regulation strategies,these emotion experiences will eventually bring negative effects to them,resulting in confidence loss,reduced work happiness,job burnout and other problems.Therefore,it is of great value to understand novice English teachers’ emotion experience,emotion regulation strategies and influencing factors for their professional development.Based on the perspective of social system theory and control theory,this study adopts the method of narrative research and selects 5 novice junior high school English teachers as the research participants.The research questions are as follows:(1)What emotions do junior high school novice English teachers experience in the teaching process?(2)What emotion regulation strategies do junior high school novice English teachers use?(3)What are the factors affecting the use of emotion regulation strategies by junior high school novice English teachers? By answering the three research questions,this paper aims to understand the current situation of the emotion experience of junior high school novice English teachers and the use of regulation strategies,help them improve their emotional management awareness and emotional intelligence,and try to put forward suggestions from different levels,so as to promote the professional development of foreign language teachers.The following findings are made in this study:(1)Novice junior high school English teachers experience three different kinds of emotions during their work,which are positive,negative and mixed emotions.Among them,positive emotions include curiosity,love,sense of achievement,being touching,happiness,incentive and sense of pride;Negative emotions include pressure,anxiety,frustration,anger,disappointment,confusion and helplessness;Mixed emotions include joy and sadness and love and hate;(2)In the process of work,novice English teachers in junior high school mainly adopt two kinds of emotion regulation strategies,namely,antecedent-focused regulation strategy and response-focused regulation strategy.The former includes attention deployment,cognitive reconstruction,lowering expectation and isolation.The latter includes situation selection,adaptation,expression suppression,relaxation,communication and self-strengthening;(3)The selection and use of emotion regulation strategies by novice English teachers in junior high school are mainly influenced by personal factors,organizational factors and social factors.Among them,personal factors include teacher personality,personal experience and teacher belief;Organizational factors mainly include colleagues,school leaders,family and friends around teachers;The social factors include national policy,school institutions and the rules that teachers should follow to show social emotion in the workplace.Based on the research findings,the following implications are obtained in this study:First of all,novice English teachers should give full play to their subjective initiative,learn and master a variety of emotion regulation strategies,in order to effectively manage their emotions and timely emotional regulation.Secondly,school leaders should pay attention to the emotional changes of novice English teachers and various environmental factors that affect their emotions,and try to create favorable conditions and atmosphere for their practice.At the same time,school colleagues should give timely help and give guidance to novice English teachers in professional aspects.Finally,foreign language teacher educators and educational policy makers can set up emotion-related courses to popularize teachers’ emotional knowledge and regulation strategies,so that novice English teachers can learn to use diversified strategies for emotional regulation.