An appraisal‐based examination of language teacher emotions in anxiety‐provoking classroom situations using vignette methodology

Abstract

Despite emerging evidence for the link between teacher emotions and student outcomes, research on language teachers' classroom emotions is still scarce. This study adopts a framework rooted in appraisal-based emotion theory to explore the complexity of teachers' emotional lives and the nature of language teacher emotions in the classroom, using anxiety as a starting point and drawing on vignette methodology for emotion elicitation. A total of 272 foreign and second language teachers from North America, Asia, and Europe completed an online version of the Foreign Language Teacher Emotion Questionnaire. Each teacher evaluated two vignettes of anxiety-provoking classroom scenarios along six appraisal dimensions and reported their emotions. Results indicate great levels of emotional complexity, revealing both the frequent presence of multiple positive emotions and the rare experience of anxiety as the sole emotion in anxiety-provoking classroom scenarios. At the same time, regression analyses found that anxiety's appraisal pattern explains between 16% and 48% of the variance in anxiety across all vignettes. Implications for adopting appraisal-based emotion theories and vignette methodology in language teachers' classroom emotion research in second language acquisition are discussed. K E Y W O R D Sappraisal theory, emotional complexity, language teacher anxiety, language teacher emotions, vignette methodology Language teacher emotions recently received increased research attention (Mercer & Kostoulas, 2018). This increase is motivated by claims that language teachers are one of the most important factors for student learning (Dörnyei, 2018) and by emerging empirical evidence for the systematic link between teacher emotions and student outcomes (Frenzel et al., 2021;Moskowitz & Dewaele,

A case study of College English teachers' emotional experiences in the blended teaching context

“…Taking anger and anxiety as an example, teacher anger was mainly linked to external causes such as technology failure and student misbehaviors, whereas anxiety was mainly linked to internal causes, such as the teachers' inability or lack of preparation to cope with the disadvantages of blended teaching model implementation, or inability to arouse students' interest in their class. These findings echoed Goetze (2023) in that the appraisals of accountability may play a role in differentiating the type of teachers' (negative) emotions. A self-directed focus resulted in anxiety, while an other-directed focus elicited anger.…”

“…Previous studies have sought to investigate teacher emotion in the context of both offline teaching (e.g., Gkonou and Miller, 2021;Nazari et al, 2023) and online teaching (e.g., Gu et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2022Liu et al, , 2023Wang and Song, 2022). Researchers found that although teachers in the offline teaching context shared some unpleasant emotional experiences (such as frustrations and anxiety), their dominant emotions were more positive than negative (Cross and Hong, 2012;Richards, 2022;Goetze, 2023). In the online teaching context, however, teachers experienced more negative emotions, such as anxiety and anger, than positive emotions, such as enjoyment and pride, due to students' failure to understand teachers' teaching goals (Wiebe and Kabata, 2010), low engagement in interactions (Liu et al, 2022), and relatively poor learning outcomes in online courses (Emerson and MacKay, 2011).…”