Language teachers’ interpersonal learner-directed emotion-regulation strategies

Abstract

The regulation of language learners’ emotions by affective, or emotion-regulation strategies has received limited research attention. This gap is being filled among others by researchers who have developed and are applying a new research tool called Managing Your Emotions for Language Learning (MYE). It is based on the vignette methodology to investigate both positive and negative language learner emotions, emotion-regulation strategies that language learners employ, and language teachers’ interpersonal learner-directed emotion-regulation strategies used in a range of familiar language learning situations. In this study teachers’ interpersonal emotion-regulation strategies and their learner- and teacher-perceived effectiveness were investigated by means of MYE (n = 64: English-major learners) and semi-structured interviews with learners (n = 16) and teachers (n = 9). The results revealed a rich context- and participant-dependent list of language teachers’ interpersonal emotion-regulation strategies, the frequency of which was perceived differently by language learners and teachers, who, however, agreed on their good effectiveness. The strategies belonging to the categories of ‘cognitive change’, ‘situation modification’ and ‘competence enhancement’ were used the most often, but some gaps in teachers’ strategic repertoires were also identified. Pedagogy-wise, MYE seemed to be suitable for closing the gap between learners’ and teachers’ perspectives on teachers’ learner-directed emotion-regulation strategy use. Teachers and their pedagogical practice would benefit from training in the area of emotion-regulation strategies and support of educational authorities.

Keywords

affective strategies emotion regulation emotion-regulation strategies interpersonal emotion-regulation strategies language learners language learning strategies language teachers

I Introduction

Linguistic development ceased to be recognized as a purely cognitive endeavor quite a while ago. The interrelationship between emotion and cognition has been stressed in numerous research projects concerning various spheres of human activity, including second language (L2) learning (e.g. Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014, 2016; MacIntyre, 2002; Oxford, 2017; Pekrun, 2014; Schumann, 2004). Research confirms adverse effects of negative emotions, especially language anxiety (e.g. Gkonou et al., 2017), on language learning (LL) outcomes, whereas the role of positive emotions, such as enjoyment and hope (MacIntyre et al., 2016; Oxford, 2015), has only recently earned researchers’ attention, which has been inspired by advances in positive psychology (Fredrickson, 2009; Seligman, 2011; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Despite general acknowledgement of the influence of affect, emotion regulation (ER) and strategies used for this purpose have attracted little research effort (see Plonsky, 2011). This gap has been noted by Oxford (2017, p. 214), who contended that, since the beginning of enquiry into learner strategies in the 1970s, ‘few L2 learning strategy researchers have explored affective strategies in sufficient depth’ and pointed out that most of the existing research focused on regulating L2 learner anxiety, which, however, resulted in neither sufficient identification and teaching of affective, or emotion-regulation strategies (ERS) nor validation of this kind of strategy instruction (see Mercer, 2015).

The paucity of research on ERS can be partly attributed to the fact that, as shown in many studies (e.g. Bremner, 1999; Lai, 2009; Peacock & Ho, 2003; Riazi, 2007), strategies that can be applied to regulate affect are the least frequently used of all strategy types. Nevertheless, recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in L2 learner emotions, with much attention paid to positive emotions (e.g. Gabryś-Barker & Bielska, 2013; MacIntyre et al., 2016) and the development of novel tools that can elicit a wide range of emotions and strategies used by both learners and teachers for managing them (Gkonou & Oxford, 2016). The present study is part of this trend and attempts to get a glimpse at ERS used or promoted by teachers to help learners deal with emotions in LL. Data collection performed by means of Managing Your Emotions for Language Learning (MYE) questionnaire developed by Gkonou and Oxford (2016) as part of the international validation effort of this tool (Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020; Gkonou, 2018; Gkonou & Oxford, 2017; Kantaridou & Psaltou-Joycey, 2017) which is currently under way, has produced a large pool of both quantitative and qualitative data, only part of which will be analysed in this study. Another source of information were in-depth interviews with learners and teachers.

II Emotion-regulation strategies in language learning

Oxford (2017, p. 48) defines language learning strategies (LLS) as:

complex, dynamic thoughts and actions, selected and used by learners with some degree of consciousness in specific contexts in order to regulate multiple aspects of themselves (such as cognitive, emotional, and social) for the purpose of (a) accomplishing language tasks; (b) improving language performance or use; and/or (c) enhancing long-term proficiency.

Oxford (2017) adds that, despite being part of mental reality, strategies can be observed in learners’ actions, and their use is flexible and creative. LLS reflect the character of the context in which they are used and learners’ needs, and they are teachable. A group of LLS called affective strategies (or ERS) are used to improve learners’ emotions, attitudes and even motivation related to LL (Oxford, 2011).

According to Gross (1998), emotions originate and grow in intensity within a recurrent loop of situation, attention, appraisal and response. An individual encounters a situation, attends to and interprets it, which, in turn, often gives rise to a particular type of emotional reaction. LL is fraught with situations in which students experience various emotions, and their origin may be explained with the help of Gross’s model.

ER involves ‘the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions’ (Gross, 1998, p. 275). The ER processes may be roughly divided into those which down-regulate (i.e. decrease the intensity of) negative emotions and those which up-regulate (i.e. increase the intensity of) positive ones. While the above definition and much early work in this area took an intrapersonal perspective on ER (emotion self-regulation), very recently there have been calls to also incorporate an interpersonal perspective on ER, which involves ER by and with the help of others (e.g. Barthel et al., 2018; Hofmann, 2014; Zaki & Williams, 2013). This kind of ER may in fact be more effective than self-regulation because under social baseline theory (Coan & Maresh, 2013) the human brain uses less energy for ER when supported by others (Barthel et al., 2018). Interpersonal ER seems to be of crucial importance in the language classroom, where teachers can be of immense help in managing the emotions of learners caught up in the sensitive and emotionally-loaded process of LL (Gkonou & Miller, 2019).

Oxford (2017), a pioneer of language education strategy research, offered a new taxonomy of ERS for LL. The list, based on Gross’s (1998, 2015) model, comprises five major families of strategies:

situation selection, which entails avoiding circumstances causing negative affect or seeking those generating positive emotions;

situation modification, which serves the purpose of altering the situation so that emotions are more favorable;

attention deployment, which stands for redirecting attention to improve emotions;

cognitive change (known also as reframing or reappraisal), which involves reappraising the personal meaning of a situation; and

response modification, which implies directly affecting one’s physical, psychological or behavioral reaction to a situation provoking negative affect.

Some ERS have been found to be more beneficial than others, with cognitive change often regarded as one of the best strategy groups and emotional suppression, a form of response modification, as one of the worst (John & Gross, 2004). As was the case with other strategy groups originally discussed by Oxford (1990), affective strategies were complemented by meta-affective ones as part of a self-regulation model introduced in Oxford (2011). Meta-affective strategies facilitate learner control over the use of affective strategies; however, despite being important for executive control in strategic learning, they will not be of significant interest in this study because they were rare in our data.

Emotion self-regulation has been found to correlate with positive educational experiences and outcomes such as achievement (Djambazova-Popordanoska, 2016), engagement (Fried & Chapman, 2012) and good group climate (Bakhtiar et al., 2018). Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020), a study which is part of the same validation effort of MYE as the present investigation, established a comprehensive, context-dependent taxonomy of English-majors’ ERS, which was informed by but more nuanced than previous classifications, especially the one by Webster and Hadwin (2015). The most often used ERS belonged to the families of cognitive change (43.2% of all ERS), situation modification (25.5%) and attention deployment (13.3%). The choice of particular ERS, which were seen as mostly successful by both learners and teachers, seemed to depend on specific situations, the learning context and participant characteristics.

Concerning interpersonal ER in the area of education, there has been limited research on learners’ mutual co-regulation of emotions (e.g. Järvenoja et al., 2017, 2019) and teachers’ co-regulation of their learners’ emotions (e.g. Kurki et al., 2016; Silkenbeumer et al., 2018). However, the latter concerns exclusively very young children, so it is not clear whether the results may apply to older learners as well. Still, it was found that teachers use much more activity-focused (e.g. directing attention and encouraging thinking) than emotion-focused (e.g. physical soothing) strategies (Kurki et al., 2016) and adjust their co-regulation to children’s age and self-regulation (Silkenbeumer et al., 2018). Kurki et al. (2016) suggested that despite having some knowledge and skills, teachers might still benefit from training in the area of ER.

Given a vast area of research on learner strategies, the scope of investigations focusing on language teachers’ strategies directed at learners appears strikingly modest, especially when it comes to ERS. There are some quasi-experimental studies testing the effects of certain language-anxiety-reduction strategies on learners’ anxiety (Alrabai, 2015; Nagahashi, 2007). Because they are quantitative in nature and probe the effectiveness of many pre-determined strategies and teaching solutions together, they do not shed light on teachers’ naturalistic use of specific ERS. A rare example of a qualitative study, Gkonou and Miller (2019) focused on several English teachers in Greece, all of whom ‘commented on the intentional anxiety-mitigating strategies that they regularly practiced in their classrooms’ (p. 381), and established that teachers, to down-regulate learners’ language anxiety, combine cognitive and affective strategies that belong to the situation modification type including task management, task modification (these terms are explained in Section V.1), and creating a relaxed atmosphere. The authors pointed out, as did Pavlenko (2013), that relations with teachers are also highly relevant for learner emotions. Gkonou and Miller (2019) additionally noted that English teachers, who position themselves as ‘caring’, often do the ‘emotional work’ of striking a balance between taking care of learners’ emotions and simply teaching the syllabus. In addition, they also do the ‘emotional labor’ of manipulating and masking their own emotions (Loh & Liew, 2016). Importantly, reflecting the long-standing bias in applied linguistics in favor of researching negative emotions, the above studies focused on teachers’ strategies intended to down-regulate language anxiety, to the exclusion of the up-regulation of positive emotions. The main objective of the present research is gaining insight into language teachers’ learner-directed ERS aimed at both up-regulating positive and down-regulating negative emotions, a definitely neglected research area.

III Aim, design and research questions

The general aim of the study was the investigation of ERS applied by language teachers in the classroom to decrease negative and boost positive learner emotions and thereby improve learning outcomes. The study represents a mixed-methods approach as both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analysed. Specifically, the following research questions were addressed:

Research question 1: What interpersonal learner-directed ERS do language teachers use and what ERS do they promote?

Research question 2: To what extent do learners and teachers perceive teachers’ interpersonal learner-directed ERS as effective?

An additional aim was to further validate MYE; therefore, one more research question was addressed:

Research question 3: To what extent is MYE a valid instrument?

IV Method

1 Participants

The questionnaire was administered to 64 first- and second-year English majors (43 females, 21 males) at two universities in mid-sized Polish towns. They volunteered to participate in the study and were offered additional credit in a university course in exchange. Polish was the first language (L1) of all but one, whose L1 was English. Their age ranged between 18 and 30 years old (the vast majority were 20 and 21 years old). Their proficiency level was estimated, with very few exceptions, at B1/B2 (intermediate), according to the Common European Framework for Languages, which is a reference scale for establishing language proficiency levels. At university, the participants attended EFL classes aimed at developing their skills and expertise in language subsystems (reading and writing, speaking and listening, pronunciation, and grammar). They also took content courses such as linguistics, British and American literature and culture, and didactics and pedagogy, most of which were taught in English. All participants were highly motivated as their future careers were related to the qualification dependent on their command of English. Among the reasons behind LL, 95% mentioned interest in the language, 86% needing it for their future job, 78% needing it for travel, 42% being willing to learn more about the target-language culture, and finally, 37.5% having friends who speak the language.

Interviews were conducted with 16 student participants (four males, 12 females) on a voluntary basis as well as nine teachers of English (six females, three males), five of whom were high school teachers (some were former teachers of some of the student participants) and four university teachers of the learner participants at the time of the study. The teachers’ age range was from 28 to 47. All were qualified teachers of English with an MA degree, with one holding a PhD in English literature.

2 Data collection and analysis

Two data-collection procedures were used: MYE (Gkonou & Oxford, 2016) and semi-structured interviews. Both were conducted in the participants’ mother tongue to ensure greater comfort and ease of expression. The survey was translated into Polish by one of the present authors, and then back-translated into English by the other author to ensure the accuracy of the first translation. MYE is an example of the so-called ‘vignette methodology’ (Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020; Collett & Childs, 2011; Hughes, 1998) that obtains opinions, attitudes or perceptions from responses to hypothetical situations. The use of vignettes in L2 research has not been popular to date despite being a cheap and efficient way of eliciting information on people’s behavior that may be difficult to observe, sensitive or rare (Collett & Childs, 2011). In the case of enquiry into LLS, a major advantage of MYE is that it elicits information on the quality of strategy use rather than its mere frequency. Learners describe their reactions to hypothetical but realistic scenarios and/or, if they had experienced the situations, recall their actual responses. The strategies are thus provided in an open-ended fashion. This contrasts with many tools traditionally used to tap into learners’ strategic behavior, including the SILL (Oxford, 1990), which delimit responses to a set of predetermined options whose frequency of use is to be indicated (Gkonou & Oxford, 2017).

MYE consists of 10 scenarios describing emotion-inducing situations that might happen in a language classroom, for example, being corrected by a language teacher in front of the whole class (see Table 1 for short descriptions and labels of the MYE scenarios; note that Scenario 6 was excluded from the present analysis [and the table] as it concerns regulating a peer’s emotions rather than the respondent’s). In their responses, participants specified what emotions, positive or negative, they would feel in a given situation, what they would do to deal with the negative and boost the positive ones, whether they had actually experienced such situations and if so, how they had dealt with emotions. Moreover, respondents were asked whether their teachers had attempted to assist them in these situations emotion-wise, how they had done that and if these attempts had been successful. In the present investigation, only the part of data which is pertinent to teachers’ regulation of learners’ emotions will be considered, with learners’ own ER dealt with in Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020).

Table 1.

Managing Your Emotions for Language Learning (MYE) scenario numbers, labels and short descriptions.

Number	Label	Description
1	LATE WRITING	You are supposed to write a timed composition in class, and after several minutes you notice that others have already started writing while you are still working on an outline.
2	CORR. TEACHER	You are corrected by the teacher in front of the whole class.
3	CORR. PEER	You are corrected by a peer in front of the whole class.
4	FAILED TEST	You get a low score for a big test, and two such tests are still ahead.
5	CONVERS. WITH TEACHER	You are about to take part in a one-on-one conversation with the teacher about the language class.
7	GROUP WORK WITH NEW PEER	You have to complete a group project, but you barely know one of the group members.
8	INCOMPREHENSION	You do not understand a question asked by the teacher.
9	UNPREPARED	You come to class unprepared (you have not done your homework).
10	BORING RULE	The teacher is explaining a grammar rule which you have already understood for the benefit of other students.

Note. All scenarios refer to foreign language classes.

Source. Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020.

The assistance provided by teachers with respect to ER and its effectiveness was also the main agenda of the follow-up semi-structured in-depth interviews with students and teachers, conducted to complement the MYE responses, which were sometimes laconic (see, for example, the category of general and vague responses mentioned in Section V). The interviews were intended to serve the purpose of triangulation and to provide the teachers’ perspective to the study. The questions used with both groups of participants, which are included in Appendix 1, were similar and concerned ER in LL and teaching; however, they did not make reference to any specific scenarios but enquired generally about language teachers’ learner-directed ways of regulating emotions. The focus of this study in the teacher interviews was on the strategies teachers apply or promote among their learners to help them manage emotions, whereas in the learner interviews the focus was on learner experiences of teachers’ interpersonal ER and strategy promotion. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed by means of CLARIN tools (mowa.clarin-pl.eu; Koržinek et al., 2016). The survey and interview responses were fed into a spreadsheet and their analysis performed in NVivo 11. In both MYE and the interviews respondents came up with any strategies they could think of; thus, both thematic and content analysis (Marschall & Rossman, 2006) was applied to identify recurrent themes in several rounds of inspection of the data. The dominant patterns were confronted against previous research (most of which concerned learners’ ERS) including work by Gross (1998, 2015), Oxford (2017), Webster and Hadwin (2015) and Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020). There was a good fit between the categories (specifically, families and top-level categories, categories and subcategories; see Section V.1 and Table 4 for details) of ERS identified in this earlier work and our data. Therefore, the types of ERS identified in the present study and their labels reflect to a large extent these established in previous research, although their wording is sometimes slightly different to reflect the fact that these are teachers’ learner-directed strategies rather than learners’ own. In addition, several new categories of ERS were identified in the interviews because the respondents mentioned some ways of managing emotions which were sufficiently qualitatively different from the pre-established types to deserve their own category status. Coding was done by the two authors independently, with infrequent disagreements discussed and settled after some deliberation. Content analysis involved calculating raw numbers and percentages with reference to specific strategy categories.

V Results

The results based on the data gathered by the two tools will be presented in two separate sections. In each, the ERS used by teachers will be presented in the order of their popularity revealed by a given tool.

1 MYE

Although the analysis of the emotions evoked by the scenarios (Ss) is beyond the scope of this study (for some analysis of emotions see Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020), it is worth noting that, as shown in Table 2, the situations had the potential to generate mostly negative emotions, with the exception of S5 (CONVERS. WITH TEACHER),¹ S7 (GROUP WORK NEW PEER) and S10 (BORING RULE), in which the percentages of responses categorized as positive emotions exceeded negative ones, with respectively 90.6%, 85.9% and 56.2% of participants mentioning positive emotions. S2 (CORR. TEACHER), being corrected by the teacher, evoked almost an equal amount of both types of feelings (51.6% for positive and 54.7% for negative). A wide range of discrete emotion words were used to identify how participants would feel in the situations. For example, positive emotions included being amused, grateful, interested, joyful, serene, motivated/determined and humble; while negative ones included feeling stressed, angry, ashamed, embarrassed, sad and scared. In some cases no label for the emotion experienced was provided or the feeling of indifference was noted. As shown in Table 3, the hypothetical scenarios generally turned out realistic and reflective of the context of enquiry because 89.1% of the respondents reported actually experiencing S1 (LATE WRITING) and S2 (CORR. TEACHER), 78.1% experienced S9 (UNPREPARED), and 68.8%, 59.4% and 56.3% knew from experience the situations in S8 (INCOMPREHENSION), S10 (BORING RULE) and S7 (GROUP WORK NEW PEER), respectively. Even when less than half the participants had experienced a given scenario, the percentages were still over 40% (S3: CORR. PEER; S4: FAILED TEST), except for just one scenario (S5: CONVERS. TEACHER; 28.1%).

Table 2.

Positive and negative emotions generated by the scenarios in terms of percentages of participants (n = 64) declaring their experience.

Scenarios		Emotions
Number	Label	Positive	Negative
1	LATE WRITING	17.2	84.4
2	CORR. TEACHER	51.6	54.7
3	CORR. PEER	26.6	75.0
4	FAILED TEST	21.9	87.5
5	CONVERS. WITH TEACHER	90.6	14.1
7	GROUP WORK WITH NEW PEER	85.9	28.1
8	INCOMPREHENSION	6.2	95.3
9	UNPREPARED	7.8	90.6
10	BORING RULE	56.2	39.1

Table 3.

Percentages of participants (n = 64) who experienced the scenario situations and who received teacher’s both successful and unsuccessful help (interpersonal regulation of emotions).

Scenarios		Experience of scenario		Teacher’s help
Number	Label	Yes	Not	Total	Successful	Unsuccessful
1	LATE WRITING	89.1	10.9	38.8	18.8	20.0
2	CORR. TEACHER	89.1	7.8	37.5	28.1	9.4
3	CORR. PEER	43.8	51.6	15.7	9.4	6.3
4	FAILED TEST	42.2	53.1	17.2	14.1	3.1
5	CONVERS. WITH TEACHER	28.1	67.2	18.8	18.8	0.0
7	GROUP WORK WITH NEW PEER	56.3	43.8	14.0	4.6	9.4
8	INCOMPREHENSION	68.8	31.3	39.4	23.4	16.0
9	UNPREPARED	78.1	15.6	28.6	15.6	13.0
10	BORING RULE	59.4	39.1	18.7	15.6	3.1

When it comes to the total percentages of both successful and unsuccessful teacher learner-directed interpersonal ER interventions which the respondents recalled in the situations they had actually experienced, as shown in Table 3, they never exceeded the 40% threshold, showing that less than half of the students witnessed any teacher-generated move aimed at helping them manage emotions. The highest percentage of teachers’ learner-directed strategies that were reported was noted for S8 (INCOMPREHENSION; 39.4%) and S1 (LATE WRITING; 38.8%). Other scenarios that resulted in a relatively high incidence of reactions on the part of the teacher included S2 (CORR. TEACHER; 37.5%) and S9 (UNPREPARED; 28.6%). As for the remaining scenarios, the percentages of reported teacher interventions oscillated between 14.0% and 18.8%. However, as can be seen in Table 3, teacher reactions very often equaled effective action, at least as perceived by participants. The tactics applied by the teachers were considered successful in more cases than unsuccessful in as many as seven scenarios. But for S1 (LATE WRITING), where the strategies used by the teacher were considered successful by 18.8% and unsuccessful by 20.0% of the participants, and S7 (GROUP WORK NEW PEER), with 4.6% deemed successful and 9.4% unsuccessful, the majority of the attempts at assisting students in the remaining scenarios were perceived as effective. Significantly, in S2 (CORR. TEACHER), S4 (FAILED TEST), S5 (CONVERS. WITH TEACHER) and S10 (BORING RULE), the successful percentages were at least three times as high as the unsuccessful ones, and in S5 (CONVERS WITH TEACHER) no ineffective interventions were noted, with all of the reported moves (18.8%) considered successful. The learner-perceived effectiveness of teachers’ ERS interventions according to strategy type will be considered after the presentation of the ERS themselves.

In what follows major strategy families and top-level categories of responses are in italicized capitals, strategy categories are italicized and subcategories are underlined and italicized (the same conventions are used in Table 4). There were 141 references to teachers’ regulation of learner emotions in MYE. It needs to be noted here that they were learners’ reports of their teachers’ ERS and should be viewed as interpretations of their teachers’ actions rather that fact. As shown in Table 4, the largest group of learner-reported strategies applied by teachers belonged to the family of COGNITIVE CHANGE (67 references; 47.5% of all the references). These tactics were further divided into the categories of acceptance (29; 20.6%), effort-orientation (20; 14.2%), and reassurance (18; 12.8%). Acceptance concerns encouragement to accept seemingly adverse circumstances that cannot be easily changed such as making mistakes. For example, for S1 (LATE WRITING) the respondents evoked circumstances in which teachers reminded them that everyone writes at their own pace and has their own strategy, that trial and error can be a way of learning, and so on, as in: ‘He motivated [me] to focus on task completion and explained that its pace depends on personality.’ Effort-orientation refers to the accounts of teachers’ attempts to make learners decide to make (more) learning effort, as exemplified by a student’s quote: ‘He suggested that the aim of homework is our development and when we do not do it, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to develop’ (S9: UNPREPARED). Reassurance, a strategy similar to Wolters’ (2003) efficacy self-talk, refers to teachers conveying to learners that they have the ability to succeed in task completion and learning, as in these reports: ‘She stressed my strengths so I knew I would succeed’ (S4: FAILED TEST) and ‘he tried to boost my sense of self-worth’ (S2: CORR. TEACHER).

Table 4.

References to the strategy families, categories and subcategories in Managing Your Emotions for Language Learning (MYE) (n = 141); and numbers of interview participants’ reports of strategy families, categories and subcategories.

Strategy families, categories and subcategories	References in MYE				Number of interview reports
	Number	Percent	Number of successful (S) and unsuccessful (U) uses		Learners (n = 16)	Teachers (n = 9)
	Number	Percent	S	U	Learners (n = 16)	Teachers (n = 9)
ATTENTION DEPLOYMENT	4	2.8	2	1	1	1
Distraction	1	0.7	1		1	1
General distraction ^#					1	1
Termination of comparison with peers ^*	1	0.7	1
Task focus^*	2	1.4	1	1
Comparison with peers^*	1	0.7
Goal-orienting^#					2	1
COGNITIVE CHANGE	67	47.5	37	16	5	6
Acceptance	29	20.6	19	5	2	3
Reassurance	18	12.8	7	8	3	5
Effort-oriented decision	20	14.2	11	3		2
RESPONSE MODIFICATION	4	2.8				2
Breathing^#						1
Simple meditation^#						1
Suppression^*	4	2.8
Playing music^#						1
Resting^#						1
SITUATION MODIFICATION	37	26.2	22	2	10	8
Task modification^*	23	16.3	14	1
Social support^*	12	8.5	7	1
Recognition of fault ^*	3	2.1	3
Offering and seeking help and social sharing ^*	8	5.7	3	1
Thanking ^*	1	0.7	1
Task management^*	2	1.4	1
Interesting or easy activities^#					5	5
Humor^#					3	4
Relaxed atmosphere^#					4	4
Good (or no) grades^#						3
Interest in course^#						1
Good relationships^#					1	2
SITUATION SELECTION	2	1.4		1		3
DOING NOTHING ^*	8	5.7	1	2
COMPETENCE ENHANCEMENT ^*	14	9.9	11	3
GENERAL AND VAGUE RESPONSES ^*	6	4.3	1	2

Notes. Empty cells indicate absence of references/reports. Major strategy families and top-level categories of responses are in italicized capitals (no indentation), strategy categories are italicized (small indentation) and subcategories are italicized and underlined (large indentation). * = strategies reported only in MYE; ^# = strategies reported only in the interviews.

SITUATION MODIFICATION (37; 26.2%) was the second most numerous strategy family. Three categories were identified here: task modification (23; 16.3%), social support (12; 8.5%), and task management (2; 1.4%). Task modification entails the teacher changing (or making the student change) task conditions or the way of doing a task, for example by rephrasing questions (S8: INCOMPREHENSION), careful choice of vocabulary to enable understanding (S8: INCOMPREHENSION), or writing an outline (S1: LATE WRITING). Social support came in three forms: (a) offering help to students and making them seek help from peers and engage in social sharing (i.e. learning together and sharing emotions; 8; 5.7%), for example, ‘she helped me to write the introduction’ (S1: LATE WRITING) and ‘she encouraged me to talk to the new peer and get to know this person better’ (S7: GROUP WORK NEW PEER); (b) recognition of fault (3; 2.1%), for example, ‘the teacher said he understood the situation and asked me to do the homework for the next class’ (S9: UNPREPARED) and (c) thanking (1; 0.7%), which was making the learner thank a peer: ‘The teacher told me not to worry and thank [for the correction]’ (S3: CORR. PEER). Task management (2; 1.4%) was extending the time needed to accomplish the task.

COMPETENCE ENHANCEMENT (14; 9.9%) was another frequently-referred-to strategy in MYE. Teachers’ moves of this kind involved explaining language material and offering hints on effective learning and the impact of emotions on learning, for example: ‘The teacher corrected my error and explained how to say it correctly’ (S3: CORR. PEER) and ‘she kept saying that too much stress disorganizes’ (S1: LATE WRITING). Moves such as increasing practice opportunities (S2: CORR. TEACHER) and rehearsing examination procedures (S1: LATE WRITING) in class were also interpreted by learners as aimed at helping them manage emotions.

According to Webster and Hadwin (2015), DOING NOTHING may be an ER strategy when emotions are perceived as desirable because not doing anything about them may prolong their experience. There were 8 (5.7%) explicit MYE references to teachers’ doing nothing, which in some cases may have been strategic, as when ‘there was no need’ (S2: CORR. TEACHER) to manage learners’ emotions. Because of their very nature, some instances of this strategy certainly went unnoticed by participants.

Another uncertain category were responses labeled GENERAL AND VAGUE (6; 4.2%), in which participants indicated that their teachers offered help, motivated them or taught how to deal with stress, but they did not really describe the actual actions that were undertaken.

RESPONSE MODIFICATION strategies (4; 2.8%) comprised teachers’ attempts to make learners control their reactions to stress-provoking situations. It took the form of suppression (3; 2.1%), by which the teacher recommended controlling the expression of one’s emotions or set an example by remaining calm: ‘The teacher explained that all emotions are important, but wrong ones should be substituted with good ones’ (S2: CORR. TEACHER ) and ‘she smiled and told me not to get nervous’ (S2: CORR. TEACHER). The strategy family of ATTENTION DEPLOYMENT (4; 2.8%), which consists in shifting the thoughts away from nerve-wrecking circumstances, took three forms: (a) task focus (2; 1.4%), that is, the teacher advising students to concentrate on the task at hand (S1: LATE WRITING), (b) distraction (1; 0.7%), and in particular termination of comparison with peers : ‘She tried to convince me not to pay attention to how others worked’ (S1: LATE WRITING), and (c) the teacher initiating comparison with peers (1; 0.7%): ‘The teacher directed questions at every student’ (S2: CORR. TEACHER).

Finally, SITUATION SELECTION (1; 0.7%), which was reported only once, involved the teacher trying to prevent the re-occurrence of an anxiety-inducing situation by asking a peer not to peer-correct again (S3: CORR. PEER).

Results concerning learner-perceived effectiveness of teacher interventions according to strategy type are presented in Table 4, which includes, among other things, numbers of successful and unsuccessful uses of different ERS reported by learner participants in MYE. Most strategy families, categories and subcategories were viewed as effective more often, in many cases much more often, than not. For example, COGNITIVE CHANGE was regarded as successful 37 times and as unsuccessful 16 times; acceptance, a subcategory of COGNITIVE CHANGE, was successful 19 times and unsuccessful 5 times; SITUATION MODIFICATION was successful 22 times and unsuccessful 2 times; task modification, a subcategory of SITUATION MODIFICATION, was successful 14 times and unsuccessful just once; and COMPETENCE ENHANCEMENT was successful 11 times and unsuccessful 3 times. In the rare cases when there were more ineffective uses of a given ERS (reassurance, SITUATION SELECTION, DOING NOTHING and GENERAL AND VAGUE RESPONSES), the difference was never higher than just one use, and most of these ERS, except for reassurance, were classified as successful or not by not more than three participants, which precludes forming strong generalizations. It should also be noted that quite a few uses of the strategy categories were not classified by participants as either successful or not (there were also some indications of [in]effectiveness without listing a strategy).

2 Interviews

Strategies belonging to the category of SITUATION MODIFICATION were the most frequently referred to in the interviews since as many as eight teachers and 10 learners made reference to such tactics, as shown in Table 4. These included setting up particularly interesting or easy activities, sometimes with the use of technology, as in this quote (following every quote in parentheses there is an interview participant code: T = teacher, L = learner; unspaced ellipses indicate hesitation):

Some kinds of competition, which they love. When we covered tenses we had a lot of group competitions, and a prize, there has always been a prize. The group which wins, everybody gets a 10% bonus added to a test score . . . Even if there was a student in a group who I saw did not work and did not really contribute to the group’s victory … what does it matter, he or she gets the bonus anyway because it may make this friggin’ student start working, right? (T2)

SITUATION MODIFICATION also implicated creating a relaxed atmosphere, offering good grades, or abstaining from giving grades, if these were to be bad, showing extraordinary interest in the subject matter being taught, and displaying humor, a good example of which is this quote:

I try to, perhaps in a more intuitive manner, and this is really a rather controversial solution, but sometimes when we do sentence translation or sentence transformation and I ask for example five people to write the sentences on the board, I then praise only those which include mistakes, and I criticize those [laughter] which are OK, for fun. Then it is fun and they feel relaxed and the ones who … the bad ones feel OK about it, they have fun. I think that crazy techniques like this one have a good effect on them. (T7)

It should be admitted that the classification of the above strategies as subcategories of SITUATION MODIFICATION may be somewhat controversial; they might also be classified as examples of SITUATION SELECTION. Deciding which of the two options applies better in a given case should depend on whether the teacher’s move was of a more pre-emptive (creating or selecting a given situation for learners in advance with the aim of provoking some and preventing other emotions) or reactive nature (modifying a situation to improve the emotions that were provoked). Classification problems of this sort emerged in some other cases as well, and, as stated in Section IV.2, they were solved in discussions between the two authors. Still, some degree of arbitrariness should be admitted here, but we believe it is not a major problem because the nature of the strategies, which we always describe over and beyond the mere labels, is much more important than the labels themselves.

COGNITIVE CHANGE, the category to which most of the techniques mentioned in the survey belong, was identified by six teachers and five learners in the interviews. A frequent target of COGNITIVE CHANGE was students’ acceptance of difficult or unpleasant aspects of LL, for example language errors and less exciting or even boring practice activities. Teachers explain that errors and small failures are an inevitable part of language development which should be treated as opportunities for learning rather than signs of ignorance learners should be ashamed of. Promotion of the acceptance of all the unpleasant sides of LL sometimes takes the form of presenting it as a particularly rewarding endeavor, inherently different from studying other school subjects in how it affects learners’ identity and their perception of the world, as well as how it opens many job or travel opportunities:

I try to encourage them … explain that playing with every language is a new adventure, they hear it from me all the time, that they should not study a language in a strict sense, that it can be something very interesting, that every new language is a completely new chapter, new book, something entirely new. (T1)

COGNITIVE CHANGE was also implemented through teachers’ attempts to encourage learners to decide to sustain effort (effort-orientation), also by praise for the work done, and to reassure them (reassurance) that they can be successful language learners and acquire the necessary abilities:

I encourage them to participate in competitions, to test themselves, to at least gain the experience so that next year, for example, they know how it works and they will do much better. (T2)

I try to somehow comfort them, calm them down, say that everything is going to be OK, right. I often try to … I use the words wonderful, brilliant a hundred times. I do it all the time, but it works, it really works; one can see that they feel much better then. (T4)

Three teachers referred to SITUATION SELECTION, that is, making students resort to alternative, possibly more enjoyable techniques that could enhance learning such as using LL smartphone apps, watching English-speaking movies, listening to songs and interacting with more proficient language users, all this also with a view to increasing L2 exposure. Developing a more favorable attitude towards learning can also be accomplished by allowing learners to rely on their L1 to a larger extent:

When it comes to individuals who find languages difficult, I try . . . to replace certain tasks offering for example speeches about the culture and institutions of a given country. Though in Polish, they can thus demonstrate their achievement; they inform the class about the important elements of the culture of these regions . . . and this is their chance to distinguish themselves and show their better side, and usually this works because the foreign language is the most difficult to them, and when they work in Polish . . . it is obviously much easier. (T1)

Reference to ATTENTION DEPLOYMENT was made by one teacher and one learner. One subcategory of distraction, a category of ATTENTION DEPLOYMENT, may be called general distraction as it involved discussing topics that were not directly related to the course or task, which could be done in a jocular mood, as shown in a learner’s comment about teachers: ‘They do not constantly talk about learning, but they also weave other things into the class, some anecdotes, well, whatever else . . .’ (L3). The second category was goal-orienting, which is making learners think of the accomplishment of future goals:

And I certainly encourage them by saying what they are going to achieve if they do something and what our goals are and what we have to do to, for example, to learn to write essays, what this is for, and if they do not want to write, I explain what this is all about and why they need this in the first place. (T2)

Two teachers mentioned promoting RESPONSE MODIFICATION in the form of simple meditation (counting to 10) and slowing down breathing, and through playing (classical) music in the background in the classroom:

I often, because I like music, introduce songs in class, or I have … , when they were for example reading, to help them concentrate, I play classical music in the background, such relaxation techniques. I know that some [teachers] use in-class exercise or deep breathing, stuff which reduces the level of stress. (T6)

Additionally, two teachers and one learner mentioned creating and maintaining good relationships between teachers and students as a way of improving learner emotions. Examples include quickly learning and using students’ first names with the help of name badges or simply making small talk with learners at the beginning of a class.

The above results demonstrate that teachers’ accounts were more elaborate than students’. Teachers’ descriptions of strategies used to help learners manage emotions in LL were full of details and examples. Teachers uniformly expressed concern for the way learners feel in the classroom and stressed the importance of developing positive attitudes towards other students, the target language culture and users, and LL in general. Somewhat surprisingly, none of the teacher interviewees reported ever participating in any form of training aimed at equipping them with skills pertinent to ER, neither their own nor their students’.

Interestingly, as many as six learners explicitly said or implied that not all language teachers help manage them their emotions. However, those that do try to help in this respect are usually perceived by learners as effective because nine student participants (out of 16) claimed or implied that teachers’ help is usually successful. Similarly, the majority of the teachers, as many as six (out of nine), thought that their attempts at the regulation of learner emotions are mostly successful, with three not entirely certain.

VI Discussion and implications

A slightly disparate picture of student-oriented ERS applied by language teachers emerges from the present investigation. In the learners’ view, only some teachers try to help them regulate their emotions and this does not happen very often. However, if such attempts are made, they are usually perceived as effective. The teachers, on the other hand, declared considerable concern about their students’ feelings and uniformly reported frequent attempts at regulating learners’ emotions, and the majority considered such actions successful. The difference between the two groups’ perceptions can be attributed to the fact that learners might not always be able to interpret their teachers’ behavior as helping them manage emotions. Silkenbeumer et al. (2018) found that teachers of very young learners tend to adjust their learner-directed ER to learners’ own ER. This kind of accommodation of ER may be reflected in the results of our study. Teachers may have perceived some kinds of learners’ own ER and may have therefore deemed conspicuous forms of ER on their part unnecessary. Instead, they may have provided very subtle forms of ER to slightly complement learners’ emotion self-regulation. This is why teachers’ learner-directed ER was possibly not always noticed by learners. Also, it cannot be excluded that only learners with a certain level of emotional intelligence are capable of properly evaluating assistance provided by the teacher, while others may fail to notice or interpret teachers’ comments or actions as emotional support. Obviously, the halo effect, the tendency to make a positive impression (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977), may have also inflated teachers’ judgments to a certain extent.

Generally, teachers’ interpersonal ERS and their frequency in the data we collected mirror learner ERS identified by Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020) with the use of the same tools and the same participants. The major families of ERS identified in the present study and their major categories had roughly the same percentages of references as the corresponding strategy categories found in Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020). For example, COGNITIVE CHANGE constituted 47.5% of teachers’ ERS and 43.2% of learners’; other examples include acceptance (teachers: 20.6%; learners: 19.0%), SITUATION MODIFICATION (teachers: 26.2%; learners: 25.5%), and social support (teachers: 8.5%; learners: 6.4%). There are only two easily noticeable differences between the two studies: ATTENTION DEPLOYMENT constituted over 13% of the learner strategies but only 2.8% of teachers’ strategies, and COMPETENCE ENHANCEMENT constituted only 1.4% of the learner strategies and 9.9% of teachers’ strategies. A possible reason for the advantage of COMPETENCE ENHANCEMENT over ATTENTION DEPLOYMENT in the teachers’ repertoire is that it is very easy and only natural for teachers to contribute to the improvement of learners’ knowledge. Other than that, several low level learner strategies were not represented in the teacher data, but all of these were of marginal importance as learners’ strategies because their frequencies were very low, never exceeding 1.6%. The presence of the differences between learners’ ERS and teachers’ interpersonal ERS implies that teachers should be cognizant of learners’ self-regulation of emotions to possibly better adjust their interpersonal ER moves to what learners do on their own in this respect (Silkenbeumer et al., 2018).

Because teachers’ learner-directed ERS identified here largely resemble, in terms of quality and quantity, learners’ own ERS, it seems that the choice of ERS was related to the MYE scenarios, the learning context and the characteristics of participants (relatively highly motivated young adults majoring in English) and their teachers (all of these were the same in the two studies). COGNITIVE CHANGE, with particularly high representation of acceptance of linguistic errors, miscommunication, and so on was much more popular than any other strategy type. This may be explained by the fact that many MYE scenarios were concerned with such themes; also, participants’ teachers were certainly fully aware of the inevitability of these glitches and their functions in LL and wanted to bring this to their students’ attention to improve their emotions. Similarly, providing reassurance and stimulating effort-orientated decisions, which were often motivational in nature and resembled Wolters’ (2003) efficacy self-talk, were natural on the part of our learners’ teachers, who wanted their relatively highly motivated students to remain so.

SITUATION MODIFICATION, the second most popular teachers’ ERS, with the dominance of task modification, may have been expected given teachers’ responsibility and power to shape and (re)design classroom tasks, especially at the tertiary level where teachers have a lot of influence on what and how they teach and are less constrained, if at all, by the textbook. The popularity of task modification (and rare use of RESPONSE MODIFICATION) reflects the previous finding that teachers prefer to co-regulate young children’s emotions by focusing on the educational activity rather than the emotions themselves (Kurki et al., 2016). It seems that this may also be true about teaching older learners. The relatively high popularity of social support, especially in the form of offering and seeking help and social sharing , may be easily explained by teachers’ positioning themselves as ‘caring’ ones (Gkonou & Miller, 2019). It is comforting to note that the use of the above strategies in fact reflects basic principles of the teaching profession and aspects of teacher training.

Furthermore, RESPONSE MODIFICATION was rare, most probably because teachers did not know about or how to implement these strategies. Often, they did not feel entitled to do this as none had ever attended any training on students’ or their own ER, despite declaring interest in this area and perceiving it as important for teacher-learner interaction and students’ attainment. Some RESPONSE MODIFICATION strategies may be easily applied and taught (e.g. the ones based on/inspired by positive psychology interventions; see Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014; MacIntyre et al., 2016). Apparently, Kurki et al.’s (2016) suggestion that young children’s teachers might benefit from awareness raising in the area of ER applies to language teachers of much older learners as well. This could even assist them in ‘emotional labor’ (Gkonou & Mercer, 2017; Gkonou & Miller, 2019; Loh & Liew, 2016) not only for their learners’ but also their own benefit (MacIntyre et al., 2019). Even though, as this study shows, they use a relatively wide range of ERS, some of which such as COGNITIVE CHANGE, especially frequent in the data, have been shown by psychological research to work really well in self-regulation (Ray et al., 2010), it seems that ERS training, either as a stand-alone module for in-service teachers or part of regular teacher training, might widen their strategy repertoires and boost their confidence in applying ERS. Another solution in this respect would be the provision by educational authorities of easily available educational-psychology consulting services to every school/university teacher, which could be the source of advice on ER and related matters, at least in crisis situations if not on an everyday basis. This way teachers could bring some insights from general and positive psychology into language classrooms. There seems to be a need for this as participants in Bielak and Mystkowska-Wiertelak (2020) and Webster and Hadwin (2015) rarely used RESPONSE MODIFICATION strategies. This also applies to meta-affective strategies, which were barely present in our results but are extremely important for managing ER and should be presented to learners.

Generally, our results support the conclusion that teachers’ learner-directed ERS are to a large extent considered as effective by both learners and teachers. This was seen at both the scenario and specific strategy levels in MYE, with learner judgments of effectiveness prevailing over judgments of ineffectiveness with respect to most scenarios and ERS, usually by a wide margin. Similarly, most of the learner and teacher interviewees perceived teachers’ ERS as effective. This may have to do with the possibility that just an act of responding to a learner’s emotions by a ‘caring’ teacher (Gkonou & Miller, 2019) offering any kind of ER help is sufficient to improve the learner’s emotions, notwithstanding the nature and quality of a given ERS, possibly by virtue of the social baseline theory (Coan & Maresh, 2013) proposition that socially-facilitated ER is more effective than individual ER. Teachers, who, as our results showed, were very much aware of the importance of learner emotions, may also trust their learner-directed ER because of their experience with daily ‘emotional labor’ (Gkonou & Miller, 2019; Loh & Liew, 2016). However, it should be remembered that many learners did not report teachers’ ER help in the scenario situations, so it seems there is still room for improvement in teachers’ learner-directed ERS in terms of its frequency and quality. It is also possible that the negative emotions experienced by our participants, generally highly motivated English majors and experienced language learners, were not very intense and therefore more easily subdued by even imperfect ERS offered by some of our teacher participants, who still admitted they would willingly undergo training in the area of emotions and ERS. This seems needed also given the fact that sometimes our learner participants were not sure of the impact of teachers’ ER on their emotions.

The results concerning the perceived effectiveness of teachers’ ERS also show that strategy use and its success depends on the situational context. Reassurance was seen as ineffective in S1 (FAILED TEST; five unsuccessful uses, no successful ones) but as quite effective in S4 (LATE WRITING; three successful uses, no unsuccessful ones). It seems that participants welcomed reassurance in a situation (FAILED TEST) in which no feasible immediate action could be taken to improve their emotions but did not value it when engrossed in a classroom task (LATE WRITING), the modification of which was seen as much more effective (four successful uses of task modification, no unsuccessful ones). Our results thus extend the contextual situatedness of self-regulated LLS, which was strongly stressed in recent years (e.g. Oxford, 2017; Oxford & Amerstorfer, 2018), to language teachers’ learner-directed strategies.

In general, the classifications of ERS used in self-regulation identified in earlier research (Bielak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2020; Gross, 1998; Oxford, 2017; Webster & Hadwin, 2015) proved suitable for investigating language teachers’ learner-directed ERS, despite the fact that we felt compelled to add some new strategy categories. Our research has revealed the relatively frequent use, variety and also flexibility of teachers’ ERS directed at students. We have found that language teachers target at their English major learners a much wider range of interpersonal ERS than identified in previous research. Gkonou and Miller (2019) referred mostly to the combination of task management, task modification and creating a relaxed atmosphere (forms of SITUATION MODIFICATION), and cognitive strategies, while here we have identified quite frequent application of strategies belonging to the family of COGNITIVE CHANGE and less frequent use of still other strategies (ATTENTION DEPLOYMENT, RESPONSE MODIFICATION, SITUATION SELECTION, DOING NOTHING). We have also identified COMPETENCE ENHANCEMENT, which seems to correspond to Gkonou and Miller’s (2019) cognitive strategies. Thus, our findings also support the flexibility of strategies (Cohen, 2014; Oxford, 2017), or the fact that one strategy may serve multiple functions; for example, the teacher’s prompt concerning a learner’s language error may be intended to improve both the learner’s understanding of a language point and their emotions. This flexibility makes the use of learner-directed ERS more likely because even teachers who feel they should not devote precious classroom time to aspects of language learning and teaching less directly linked to the language skills and subsystems (Pawlak, 2019) may still use ERS featuring other, for instance cognitive, functions. Thus, their ‘emotional work’ of balancing between tending to learner emotions and teaching language content (Gkonou & Miller, 2019) may be facilitated. This also lends support to our contention that language teachers, who, as this and other studies (Gkonou & Miller, 2019) confirm, engage in learner-directed ER of their own accord, will benefit from research into ERS. We stress here that this kind of research is therefore valuable not only in its own right but also because it may translate into pedagogical practice, a view recently contested by Pawlak (2019).

As to the validity of our results and our major tool, the scenario-based methodology of MYE has allowed us to circumvent the problems of emotion research which have to do with the sensitive nature and effusiveness of emotions and related phenomena. The MYE scenarios steered clear of these obstacles by making participants mentally ‘travel’ to and re-experience mostly familiar LL situations. We have attempted to triangulate both the data and method (Stracke, 2007) by including interviews in our research design. Comparison of the MYE and interview results support the validity of the scenario methodology: Both provided evidence for teachers’ broad use of COGNITIVE CHANGE. In addition, it seems that the two tools elicited other ERS in a complementary fashion, as shown by superscripts (^*, ^#) in Table 4. Although all the major families of ERS were attested in the two data sets, exactly 12 lowest-level strategies were found only in MYE and 12 different ones only in the interviews. Some of the tool-specific strategies, that is, the ones identified by just one of the two data collection tools, were mentioned by very few participants, presumably because they were quite rare, and their presence in one data set only may have been a coincidence. Several, however, were quite popular, and their detection by only one tool may be explained by their nature. The ones occurring solely in the interviews (interesting or easy activities, humor and relaxed atmosphere) were teachers’ general tactics which were easily elicited by the general interview questions. Those identified only in MYE, for example task modification in its varied forms, were more easily elicited by the vivid and very specific scenarios.

A pedagogical implication we can offer in the light of the fact that learners and teachers view teachers’ ERS somewhat differently is that MYE may serve non-researcher teachers as a tool for gauging their students’ perception of their ERS. For this purpose, teachers may even modify the MYE scenarios or create and add new ones fitting their teaching contexts and their learners better. Possessing such information may obviously lead to fine-tuning teachers’ ERS and give rise to classroom discussions of learner emotions and ERS at large, from which also learners could benefit for the purpose of their own ERS.

VII Conclusions

In this study we have identified a representative, although undoubtedly context-dependent list of language teachers’ interpersonal learner-directed ERS through the application of an innovative, scenario-based tool complemented by in-depth interviews. To our knowledge, this is the first study to specifically consider language teachers’ regulation of learners’ emotions from the perspective of both learners and teachers. We have found that these two groups have somewhat different takes on teachers’ ERS, especially its frequency, but not so much effectiveness, which they believe is good. The ERS we have identified are quite varied, with the predominance of those (COGNITIVE CHANGE) which have been found to be fairly effective in psychological research. Despite this, some room for improvement in terms of teachers’ range of ERS moves is possible as they neither use nor promote RESPONSE MODIFICATION and would welcome training in the area of ERS to gain more confidence in their use. This could be of benefit also for their use of ERS for self-regulation, which contributes to teacher well-being (MacIntyre et al., 2019). This study should obviously be complemented by further work based on methodologies going beyond self-report and targeting teachers and learners of different characteristics (age, proficiency, motivation, etc.) and in other contexts (e.g. in primary and secondary education). A limitation of this study is the absence of meta-affective strategies, which are nevertheless important, and ways should be devised to include them in future research. In this study we have also contributed to the validation of MYE, but further validation is recommended.

Footnotes

Appendix 1 Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the student and teacher participants of this study. We also thank the authors of Managing Your Emotions for Language Learning, Christina Gkonou and Rebecca Oxford (Gkonou, & Oxford, 2016), for making the survey available to us early on, and the anonymous Language Teaching Research reviewers for their useful comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jakub Bielak

Notes

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