A Narrative Study On Novice English Teachers’ Emotion Regulation Strategies In Senior High Schools

Teacher emotion,as the source of motivation for teachers’ professional development,is the internal factor that governs teachers’ behavior,affecting their identity and self-efficacy.Compared with experienced senior English teachers in high school,novice teachers who just left the campus for work in 1-5 years bear great pressure due to the lack of teaching and management experience.With heavy workload,continuously strengthened teacher accountability and other personal burdens,novice English teachers will experience more complex emotions during their work.If teachers’ negative emotions cannot be regulated effectively in time,it will lower their job satisfaction,causing teachers’ job burnout.In order to better listen to the voices of the novice English teachers in senior high schools,this study takes ecological dynamic system theory as the theoretical basis to investigate the emotion experience of 5 high school novice English teachers through narrative inquiry method.By answering the following three questions:(1)What emotions do novice English teachers of senior high school experience?(2)What emotion regulation strategies have been adopted by the novice English teachers?(3)What are the factors affecting novice English teachers’ emotion regulation strategies? This study sets out to explore the current situation of high school novice English teachers’ emotion experience and the corresponding regulation strategies.After that some feasible opinions and suggestions will be put forward from different stakeholders to improve high school novice English teachers’ emotional management awareness as well as their emotional intelligence,thus promoting the professional development of foreign language teachers.According to the data analysis results,this study has drawn the following findings:Firstly,novice English teachers of senior high school experience positive,negative and mixed emotions.Among which,novice English teachers experience the most negative emotions,including presssure,anger,frustration,sadness,disappoinment,confusion and anxiety.The second is positive emotions,including happiness,being moved,sense of achievement,love,expectation and incentives.The third type of emotion is mixed emotion,which includes pain and happiness as well as love and hate.Secondly,novice English teachers adopt two kinds of emotion regulation strategies.The first one is antecedent-focused regulation strategy,including attention deployment,cognitive restructuring,expectations lowering and isolation.The second type is response-focused emotion regulation strategy,which includes situation selection,adaptation,expression suppression,relaxation,communication and self-strengthening.Thirdly,the emotion regulation strategies of the novice English teachers are mainly affected by three aspects of factors.One aspect is related to the individual factors,namely,novice English teachers’ personality trait,gender,personal experience and teacher belief.Another aspect is the organizational factors such as the campus environment and other people’s influence.The last aspect,social cultural factors,involves teacher authority,traditional value and emotional display rules.Based on the above research findings,this study attempts to provide some inspiration for improving the professional development of the novice English teachers in senior high school from different perspectives of three stakeholders.(1)For novice English teacher,on the one hand,they can learn different emotion regulation strategies and timely adjust their emotions by suitable regulation strategies;on the other hand,they need to establish a good social network among their family and friends to alleviate the pressure and negative emotions brought by their own work.Last but not least,they should set up correct teacher concept or teacher belief to make sure they form correct roles and identities and perform their duty and responsibilities.(2)For teacher educators,they must pay attention to the emotion problems of the novice English teachers and treat teacher emotion education as an indispensable course for teacher education.Specifically,in the pre-service education stage,teacher educators should help English normal students to be aware of various emotions in the teaching work,and then add related contents to the curriculum or practice to cultivate their ability of understanding and expressing emotions.In the post-service education stage,teacher educators must also take seriously the role of emotion in the construction of novice English teachers’ professional identity,and provide effective training courses.During this stage,mentoring can ensure novice English teachers a positive professional development.(3)For policy makers,they can broaden the channels and establish appropriate catharsis platform to let novice English teachers express their emotions.Meanwhile,relevant education practice policies,laws and regulations should be formulated to guarantee novice English teachers’ rights.Investment for teachers’ salary should be added for novice teachers so that they can get more support.In addition,they should establish regulations to ensure an open and democratic administrative power relationship and they should empower novice English teachers.What is more,curriculum reform should be deepened to promote a new type of democratic teacher-student relationship so as to reduce teachers’ negative emotions.