The Role of Language Teachers’ Appraisal Disposition and Situated Coping in the Experience of (Un)pleasant Emotion(s)

Abstract

Language teaching is stressful and emotionally complex. Language teachers are regularly exposed to stressors, such as heavy workloads, role or social conflicts, and a lack of agency in institutional hierarchies, which impact their emotional experiences in classrooms. Recent research suggests that language teachers’ classroom emotions change dynamically across even the shortest timescales within individual lessons. While research has begun to capture this emotional complexity and dynamicity in the context of stressful classroom situations, questions remain about the role of teachers’ individual differences and situation-specific variables (e.g., teaching task, student behavior), as well as their interactions, in these processes. This survey study used an integrated appraisal and motivation framework to examine the role of language teachers’ dispositional appraisal style (i.e., threat and challenge perception) in the self-assessment of their abilities to cope with situation-specific stressors and their experiences of (un)pleasant emotions across three distinct stressful classroom scenarios. Results of regression analyses showed that only a challenge appraisal style significantly and consistently predicted higher coping expectancy and systematically moderated situated appraisals that resulted in (un)pleasant emotions. Findings highlight the importance of examining situation factors as salient variables in language teachers’ emotion research.