ABSTRACT
The impact of emotions on the construction of language teachers’ professional identity is a recent focus of research. Indeed, teachers’ emotions have long been seen as an obstacle and are not sufficiently considered in professional training which mainly concentrates on linguistic and didactic proficiency. However, pre-service teachers emphasize the emotional aspects of their work without really being heard by the educational authorities (Lemarchand-Chauvin & Tardieu, 2018). This article reports research conducted with novice (pre- and Year 1 in-service) EFL teachers. In all, 160 answered a questionnaire on their emotions at work and 12 of them volunteered to keep a logbook and to be filmed in class. Self-confrontation interviews (Clot, 2008) were conducted to have them talk about their emotions on the videos. The results show how reflectivity (Schön, 1983) made them change the valence (negative to positive and respectively) of their initial emotions at least once during the interviews. This led them to conclude that negative emotions can have a positive outcome and that, in some cases, positive emotions can turn into negative ones.
