| Teaching practice is involved with subjective and emotional experiences.The impact of teachers’ emotions cannot be underestimated because they are directly related to teaching outcomes and students’ growth.Besides,emotions are a double-edged sword that can contribute to the development of teachers’ self-efficacy and teacher identity but can also cause stress and burnout,causing them to leave the profession.In this regard,emotional regulation is crucial for teachers.The recent decades have witnessed an increasing amount of research concerning teachers’ emotions.Nevertheless,there is little empirical research that sheds light on the emotional experiences of pre-service teachers.And there is a paucity of studies exploring the dynamic changes in pre-service teachers’ emotions and the underlying mechanism for the generation of emotion regulation,causing a limited understanding of the influence of emotion regulation on internships and teachers’ professional growth.Thus,it will be helpful to explore pre-service teachers’ dynamic emotions,figure out the triggering factors and understand the impact of emotion regulation.It can also provide insights into the role of emotions in teachers’ professional development and offer suggestions for emotion management.For this purpose,this study took two EFL pre-service teachers in the M.Ed.Program of a national normal university as the participants,addressing their emotional experiences and emotion regulation strategies.Adopting a case study approach,the researcher collected data through interviews,questionnaires,artifacts,and observation to answer the following research questions.1.What emotions did pre-service teachers experience during the teaching practicum?How did they evolve?2.What emotion regulation strategies were employed by pre-service teachers? What effects did pre-service teachers’ emotion regulation strategies have on their performance in the teaching practicum?The major findings are as follows.1.Their emotional experiences were categorized into three stages.In the first stage,the opportunities to improve teaching skills triggered excitement and joy.Pre-service teachers were highly motivated to take part in various kinds of activities,such as correcting homework and attending lessons.In the second stage,the shift to online teaching caused disappointment and frustration.For they were deprived of the chance of attending public lectures and delivering lessons in classrooms.Furthermore,online teaching made it difficult for them to contact students and tutors.In the third stage,they felt sad and regretful.Because their practicum could have been more helpful and they could have experienced more if COVID-19 hadn’t spread so fast.Student teachers’ emotions were influenced by educational policies,interpersonal interactions in school communities,and individual perceptions of emotional events.When student teachers changed their perceptions towards emotional events and put themselves in the EFL learners’ shoes,negative emotions declined,and teacher-student relationships were facilitated.2.A variety of regulation strategies were used like response modulation,cognitive change,and attention deployment.By using regulation strategies,negative emotions largely were reduced.Student teachers regulated emotions when facing emotional events that led to negative feelings.Their emotion regulation was also restricted by their rules of self-expression.The study found the positive effects of response modulation and the negative impact of cognitive change.By hiding nervousness and acting enjoyment,preservice teachers performed well while delivering lessons and interacting with students,which was beneficial to the increase of self-efficacy and the development of teacher identity in an indirect way.However,the lowered anticipation towards teaching practice made student teachers less motivated.Implications were given for pre-service teachers and teacher education programs to improve student teachers’ emotion management and foster professional development. |
PDF Full Text Request