ABSTRACT

Preservice teachers (PSTs) possess emerging and hybrid identities, which are key to their agency and development. This chapter offers a theoretical and empirical account linking identity, noticing, and emotion among undergraduate PSTs. Language teacher noticing involves attention, interpretation, and decision making in the context of engagement with students (Jackson & Cho, 2018; Jackson, in preparation). Because noticing occurs during teaching practice, it is interwoven with identity-in-practice; teachers also recall and talk about what they noticed, enacting their identity-in-discourse. Moreover, studies in which PSTs notice and recall their emotional responses to teaching can inform language teacher identity-oriented education. We describe the opportunities and challenges facing PSTs in a Japanese context, reporting findings from a task-based qualitative study on PST noticing of emotions, drawing on theoretical perspectives in teacher cognition and noticing. We addressed the following research questions in the study: (1) What emotions were noticed? (2) What are the possible sources of these emotions? and (3) How did these emotions change over time? Sixteen PSTs recalled what they noticed immediately after carrying out a communicative task in the teacher role, with a peer in the student role; researchers analyzed recall data to identify instances of language teacher noticing. Results indicated that PSTs noticed a range of emotions with positive and negative connotations, whose negative sources included limitations in the PSTs’ ability to express meaning, miscomprehension by their partner, and time pressure. Positive sources included successful interaction with, and direct assistance offered by, their partner. Emotions also fluctuated over brief time spans. Based on these findings and existing literature, we suggest avenues for future research.