Exploring a Good EFL Teacher’s Strategies to Manage Her Emotions in the English Class

Abstract

Managing emotions in class is one of the essential skills to be mastered by teachers. In teacher education, managing emotions plays a crucial role in accomplishing academic success, cultural understanding, effective instruction, and efficient classroom management. Pyhältö et al.(2011) have found that teachers are easily burned out due to the inherent nature of their profession, which often involves facing emotionally demanding situations. When individuals cannot effectively control and regulate their own emotions, as well as the emotions of others, it can result in emotional labour transforming into burnout within the organisational setting. Research has indicated that teachers' emotional experiences in the classroom influence their teaching style. For instance, teachers who experience positive emotions tend to adopt a student-focused approach. In contrast, those experiencing negative emotions are more likely to employ an information transmission or teacher-focused approach (Trigwell, 2012). Experts emphasise that emotions are closely tied to every aspect of teaching and learning. Therefore, it is essential to understand how emotions operate in the school environment (Ghanizadeh & Royaei, 2015). This study investigated the strategies a good EFL teacher used to manage her emotions in English class. I conducted this research at a Senior High School in Probolinggo using a case study design. To help me determine and group the strategies that the teacher used, I adapted Gross’s (1998) two broad classes of emotion regulation. Based on the Thematic Analysis Method results, it is concluded that the teacher used both an antecedent-focused strategy and a response-focused strategy. By applying situation modification, cognitive change, and expressive suppression, the teacher can manage her emotions during the teaching and learning process and remain calm. In situation modification, the teacher has modified the situation to manage her nervousness, reluctance, and happiness. She did an “ice-breaking” when she felt nervous because she thought that her students were bored with her class. She also used the “ice-breaking” to manage her Reluctant by inviting her students to do it together. To manage her happiness, she sometimes chooses to express it. One way the teacher expressed her happiness was by giving her students a small gift after her student answered her question. Cognitive change managed the teacher’s sadness, reluctance , and happiness. She thought about her responsibility as a teacher to give her motivation and get back from Reluctant. To manage her sadness, the teacher chooses to look more into the student's potential skill rather than focusing on their misbehaviour. Another way to manage her happiness was to praise her students after the students answered her questions. Although the teacher profession believes that this job is exhausting and the teacher easily experiences burnout, with the right strategy, it can be managed. Based on the findings, future researchers should allow more time for classroom observations. This extra time will help the researcher gather more data and understand what is happening in the classroom, possibly leading to more strategies the teacher used to manage her emotions, since I only found four of gross (2015)'s seven. This research suggests that English teachers out there use the strategies in this research to control their emotions, especially negative ones like anger, which will affect their teaching quality.