ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses one preservice ESL teacher’s negotiation of pedagogy, emotions, and teacher identity during her internship teaching, based on classroom observations along with follow-up interviews and her teaching portfolio documents. Specifically examined here is how she utilized a practice of emotional scaffolding in order to evoke and mobilize a certain emotional response in her students in order to enhance their language learning. The analysis demonstrated that she prioritized her students’ feelings of security and maintained and demonstrated her calmness to build a safe space for them. The analysis also revealed that emotional scaffolding intended to mobilize students’ feelings of security was closely related to the teacher’s own emotional needs and beliefs, which highlights the effect of emotions on teachers’ pedagogical beliefs, professional identity, and instructional strategies. Building upon the view that emotion is an essential part of teacher identity and that teaching is centrally an emotional practice, the findings of the study reiterate the importance of teacher identities as pedagogical resources and furnish implications for the role emotions play on language teachers’ professional development.
