A Study Of Emotional Intelligence Of Expert English Teachers At Senior High Schools

Teacher’s emotional intelligence plays an important role in teacher’s professional development.Teachers with higher emotional ability can easily deal with interpersonal interaction and emotional problems in education,so as to achieve more effective classroom teaching results and gain higher professional happiness and self-efficacy.Expert teachers are the leaders of the teacher group.They have rich experience in teaching and educating people,and form a unique personal charm in the long-term interaction with students.Based on Mayer and Salovey’s emotional intelligence model and related researches,this study investigates the performance and factors of emotional intelligence of expert English teachers at senior high school.There are two research questions in this study:(1)In teacher-student interactions,what characteristics of emotional intelligence are showed in the five expert English senior high school teachers?(2)What factors might influence the emotional intelligence of expert English teachers at senior high school? Based on the principle of purposive sampling,the researchers selected five expert English teachers at senior high school as research participants,and collected data by semi-structured interview,classroom observation and case materials.The researcher transcribed the data into text,and analyzed them through coding.This study has these following findings.First,in the interaction between teachers and students,the emotional intelligence of senior high school English expert teachers presents the following characteristics: in terms of emotional awareness,expert teachers can be keenly aware of their different emotions in education,and most of their feelings are positive.In terms of emotional understanding,expert teachers can not only listen to and accept the release of individual students’ negative emotions,but also understand the overall learning emotional needs of the class.Third,in terms of emotional expression,excellent teachers can always keep a relatively stable emotion state in their interactions with students,and play a positive role model.At the same time,they are good at using positive expression strategies to guide students out of negative emotional state.Fourth,in terms of emotion management,teachers use more healthy strategies to deal with negative emotions in education with a positive attitude.Second,both personal and school factors influenced the emotional intelligence of these expert teachers.Personal factors played a larger effect.Personal factors include teachers’ personal traits,emotional-related knowledge and teaching belief.In terms of external factors,school climate and the rich experience in dealing with students are essential for expert teachers’ emotional intelligence.Based on the above findings,this study puts forward some suggestions for English teachers at senior high school to improve their emotional intelligence.First,school administrators need to pay more attention to and invest in the cultivation of teachers’ emotional ability.The school can regularly organize emotional ability discussion activities to give teachers a platform to share emotional problems,solve emotional difficulties and gain emotional ability.Second,teacher educators should often set up training courses related to emotional ability,provide guidance for teachers’ emotional perception ability or teachers’ language art,and encourage teachers to actively learn and improve their emotional abilities after class.Third,English teachers need to pay attention to managing their emotions and bring the development of emotional intelligence into teachers’ professional development planning;on the other hand,in the process of teaching,teachers should cultivate the habit of using emotional skills,such as paying more attention to the students’ listening state,and using more positive words in the communication between teachers and students.