It's been like a rollercoaster: a linguistic examination of the emotional experience of learning English in the narratives of pre-service English teachers

Abstract

The present two-fold theoretical research attempts to firstly identify the emotions that emerge in the oral narratives of twelve pre-service English teachers about their learning experience and, secondly, to examine their linguistic instantiation. The analysis was centred upon how the twenty two emotions, as defined by Ortony, Clore, & Collins (1988), relate to specific events, agents and objects involved in this experience of learning English in tertiary education. A secondary step was to analyse the emotion-indexed utterances and recognise lexical and discursive patterns across the corpus. The results showed a slight increase in the display of negative emotions across participants, which can be interpreted through linguistic theory of cultural scripts. It was also revealed from the data the occurrence of reproach as the highest cued emotion associated to classmates and teachers, yielding insightful reflections as to the role of those agents in the learning experience and identity construction. Finally, the discussion on the interplay of emotions, multiple functions and concept metaphors for emotions helped elucidate on the long-held debate over linguistic relativism or universality of emotions.