Investigating language learners’ emotion-regulation strategies with the help of the vignette methodology

The Effect of Positive Psychology Intervention on EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension

“…In addition, the findings of the interviews and class observations were analyzed by the qualitative procedure of content analysis. With regard to the semi-structured interviews, in order to examine the participants' emotions, following Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020), interviewees' comments were coded and categorized using a prototypical approach (Rowe, Fitness, & Wood, 2014;Shaver et al, 1987) and they were grouped into a smaller number of basic-level emotion categories (e.g., anger, sadness) and dimensions (e.g., positive or negative). In other words, certain emotions which had higher utility and frequency in everyday speech were regarded as the basic ones and then, synonymous lexical items were taken as subordinate and/or less prototypical examples of the same basic emotion (Shaver et al, 1987).…”

“…In other words, certain emotions which had higher utility and frequency in everyday speech were regarded as the basic ones and then, synonymous lexical items were taken as subordinate and/or less prototypical examples of the same basic emotion (Shaver et al, 1987). Following Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020), discrete emotions were organized under ten broad emotion dimensions of anxiety, anger, shame, sadness, boredom, enjoyment, interest, hope, gratitude, and pride. However, since the focus of our study was on four positive emotions of gratitude, hope, emotion-regulation, and empathy, and two of them were not in Rowe et al's (2014) category, we added these two emotions (i.e., emotion-regulation and empathy) to our category.…”

“…This variable was also emphasized in the study conducted by Oxford (2020), in which five teachers' and teacher educators' dynamic use of empathy, emotional intelligence, emotion regulation, and emotional labor to develop a "compass of emotion" were investigated. In addition, Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020) found that the choice of emotion-regulation strategies is situation-specific, i.e., it is based on the learning context and the participant characteristics. Moreover, the learner and teacher participants considered emotion-regulation strategies effective in the language learning context.…”

“…First, the type of emotion expressed in interviews was categorized according to valence (positive vs. negative) following Izard (2009). Then, their comments were coded and categorized using a prototypical approach (Rowe et al, 2014;Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020) to have the basic emotions. The results are provided in Table 5.…”

“…As Fredrickson and Cohn (2008) state, positive affect is the major trigger of active engagement with the learners' environment and his/her will to participate in classroom activities. Following MacIntyre and Gregersen (2012) who posited that positive emotions tend to broaden a person's perspective, opening him/her to absorb the language, some researchers investigated the generalizability of previous studies to the domain of foreign language learning focusing on such factors as emotion (Abdolrezapour, 2017a(Abdolrezapour, , 2017b(Abdolrezapour, , 2018, resilience and positive reappraisals (Chaffee et al, 2014), empathy (Mercer, 2016), flow and anti-flow (Czimmermann & Piniel, 2016), optimism (Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014), and empathy, emotional intelligence, emotion regulation (Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020;Oxford, 2020) pointing that these features bring long-term benefits by broadening attention and thinking (Fredrickson & Branign, 2005). However, MacIntyre et al (2019) called for more PP-inspired interventional studies using a wide variety of approaches that seek ways to boost EFL learners' skills.…”