Efficacious EFL Teachers’ Goals and Strategies for Emotion Management: The Role of Culture in Focus

Abstract

This research intends to explore the efficacious English teachers' goals and strategies to effectively manage their own as well as their students' emotions. The data of the study included interviews with 22 English teachers and 92 diary journals kept by 12 teachers who were among the top 20% of ELTEI (ELT teacher efficacy instrument) scorers and identified as efficacious English teachers. The results indicated that teachers' goals for regulating their positive emotions included maintaining authority in relation to students, presenting unbiased teacher character, and enhancing teaching effectiveness. For regulating negative emotions, the goals included maintaining the teacher and students' mental health, promoting teacher-student relationships, and reinforcing the image of teachers as moral guides. Teachers also used a variety of antecedent-focused and response-focused strategies hierarchically for effective emotion management including situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation. The findings were discussed with reference to the role of culture in emotion regulation and effectiveness of different sub-strategies. The results may promise some implications for teacher education programs and teacher educators about the inclusion of professional development opportunities for EFL teachers in terms of effective emotion management.

Dear Diary: An Exploration of L2 Teachers’ Emotional Experiences

“…To elucidate, the participants mostly engaged in down-regulation, which is a form of suppression, when they felt both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Gong et al (2013), Jiang et al (2016), andChahkandi et al (2016) found similar results. Gong et al (2013) revealed that in their study 74% of Chinese teachers suppressed unpleasant emotions, while they expressed (up-regulated) 65% of pleasant emotions.…”

“…The relationship between language teacher emotions and emotion regulation strategies has been addressed by several scholars (e.g., Chahkandi et al, 2016;Ghanizadeh & Royaei, 2015, Morris & King, 2020Talbot & Mercer, 2018). Language teachers are known to utilize emotion regulation strategies to reduce the intensity of unpleasant emotions and to promote pleasant emotions to attain different goals.…”

“…To ensure data triangulation, following the modification of the instrument, the authors involved a group of three independent experts (with backgrounds in language teaching and psychology) to assess the validity of the teacher diary. The instrument was partly based on the teacher diary proposed by Chahkandi et al (2016); however, it was somewhat modified to fit the current research context. Specifically, the instructions in the instrument were expanded and specified to make it easier for the participants to provide concrete answers.…”

Self-Regulation of Learning and EFL Learners’ Hope and Joy: A Review of Literature

“…The results of research in this field show a positive relationship between the construct of hope and various variables, such as self-efficacy ( Fathi and Derakhshan, 2019 ), academic performance ( Chahkandi et al, 2016 ; Mellati and Khademi, 2020 ), life satisfaction ( Csizer and Lukacs, 2010 ), academic success ( Tsuda and Nakata, 2013 ), interest and motivation to continue education ( Papi, 2018 ), intellectual conflict ( Rose et al, 2018 ), general wellbeing ( Greenier et al, 2021 ), and resilience ( Ong et al, 2006 ), and its negative relationship with academic stress ( Derakhshan et al, 2021 ), school violence ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2014 ), and academic procrastination and self-disability ( Dornyei, 2011 ). A study by Chew and Vanessa (2017) also showed that the overall expectation of 44% of the variance, according to Snyder’s theory of hope ( Snyder and Lopez, 2007 ), is an active process in which people choose goals and try to achieve them by designing different paths.…”

Investigating boredom among EFL teachers

“…The second section presented five open-Dino Dumančić: Investigating boredom among EFL teachers ended items that were designed to examine the previously mentioned aspects related to teacher boredom. The frameworks proposed by Chahkandi, Rasekh, and Tavakoli (2016) and Kruk and Zawodniak's (2018) served as guidelines in the creation of this instrument.…”