University Students’ English Achievement Emotions And Their Regulating Strategies

The experience of emotions is commonplace to all humans,even during their early educational years.A level of education that is particularly charged with strong emotions is higher education.Prior studies have centered their attention on test anxiety and classroom boredom,which are two particular kinds of achievement emotion,in Western environments,while they overlook various other emotions and corresponding emotion regulation strategies expressed in three diverse circumstances in the specific English domain.The present study capitalizes upon data from questionnaires filled in by 147 undergraduates and semi-structured interviews with 12 participants at different scores levels in the first questionnaire,on basis of The Integrated Model of Emotion Regulation in English Achievement Situation,which aims to address the research gap by probing non-English major university students’ English achievement emotions and their specific tactics employed in three different settings,that is,English class,English self-study and English test.Specifically,three research questions are addressed: 1)What are the features of university students’ English achievement emotions in three situations,that is,English class,self-study,and test-taking respectively? 2)What are the strategies for the students to regulate their English achievement emotions in the three situations? 3)What are the differences in their regulating strategies among the students with higher,intermediate,and low scores in the questionnaire of the English achievement emotions? This research is situated in a specific cultural context----G university in China.The findings show that 1)non-English major undergraduates engender positivity-dominant,divergent,and dynamic English academic emotions in three differing achievement situations;2)Differential categories of emotions regulation strategies are deployed with varying frequencies,depending partially on the type of achievement situation addressed;and 3)Participants with higher score report more adaptive emotion strategies such as problem solving,task focusing,reappraisal,acceptance,savoring in three English achievement situations,while students with low score apply more maladaptive emotion regulation strategies such as behavioral avoidance,experiential avoidance.Meanwhile undergraduates with advanced score employ more expressive suppression than other score-level students in three achievement situations.Additionally,the variety of strategies applied by students to regulate their emotions in three distinct English achievement situations can be explained by some prominent factors,including the features of achievement situations,Confucian and collectivist cultural values,students’ emotion regulation self-efficacy,and their motives in emotion regulation.This study advances scholarship on students’ English academic emotions and emotion regulation strategies by nesting the integrated model of emotion regulation in achievement situations in the English domain.Meanwhile,it updates our current perception of students’ English achievement emotion with insights about the features,antecedents,and emotion regulation strategies in the three different achievement situations.The practical contribution of this research resides in promoting evaluation policies,amplifying institutional support for university students’ affective perception,developing students’ ideas of self and emotional intelligence,and enhancing the effectiveness of teacher teaching practice.Limitations and directions for further research are also elaborated in the study.