Received: 21 September 2021 Revised: 18 February 2022 Accepted: 14 March 2023

DOI: 10.1111/ijal.12455

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Emotions, perspectives, and English language

teacher identity construction: A
phenomenographic-narrative study

Mostafa Nazari1 Sedigheh Karimpour2

1
Department of Foreign Languages, Kharazmi
University, Tehran, Iran Abstract
2
Department of English Language, Despite the recent surge of interest in language teacher
Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences,
Sari, Iran
emotions, little research has examined the role of cognitive
and social dimensions of teachers’ emotions in their iden-
Correspondence
tity construction. Adopting a phenomenographic-narrative
Mostafa Nazari, Department of Foreign
Languages, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran. approach, the present qualitative study examined the con-
Email: Mostafanazari136969@gmail.com;
nection between English language teachers’ perspectives,
std_mostafanazari@khu.ac.ir
emotions, and identities. Seventeen Iranian English teach-
ers were first presented with four emotionally charged
prompts, which involved teachers with anger, sadness, fear,
and happiness emotions, to examine their appraisal of the
prompts. The teachers were then interviewed to explore
how they made sense of the prompts relative to their
own identity construction. The findings indicated that the
teachers associated prompt-related teachers’ emotions with
personal–psychological, pedagogical, and institutional rea-
sons underlying power relations and competing discourses
shaping their own emotions and identities. Moreover, the
teachers narrated stories that were perceived as dynami-
cally shaping their identities through the reflective potential
of such experiences. The study concludes with implications
for the connection between language teachers’ cognitions
and emotions, and the role of these factors in their identity
construction.

150 © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ijal Int J Appl Linguist. 2023;33:150–168.
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NAZARI and KARIMPOUR 151

KEYWORDS
language teacher cognition, language teacher emotions, lan-
guage teacher identity, narrative inquiry, phenomenography,

1 INTRODUCTION

Theory and research in language teacher development have gradually changed from more focus on cognitive per-
spectives toward sociocultural perspectives in teacher learning. Within this changing climate, the socio-affective
dimensions of teachers’ professionalism such as identities, emotions, and motivations have received considerable
attention (Johnson & Golombek, 2020). Along these lines, recent discussions of language teacher development empha-
size the close tie between teachers’ emotions and identity construction (Fairley, 2020; Richards, 2020). The major
argument that undergirds such discussions highlights emotions as “vitally important for understanding the complex
practices and processes of teacher socialization and identity development” (Wolff & De Costa, 2017, p. 79). Although
there is a substantial body of knowledge on the connection between language teacher emotion and identity (Benesch,
2020; Golombek & Doran, 2014; Song, 2016; Wolff & De Costa, 2017), there is a need for further research that
examines the cognitive side of language teachers’ emotions and their appraisal of emotionally charged situations
contributing to their identity construction, which is underresearched in the literature of (second) language teacher
education (King & Ng, 2022). Examining teachers’ appraisal of such situations is novel and significant as it could unpack
their cognitions (Borg, 2015; Pratt, 1992). Furthermore, such situations help uncover the multiplicity and dynamicity
of teachers’ understanding (Kim & Klassen, 2018) and help delineate the nexus between language teacher identity (LTI)
and emotions (Nazari & De Costa, 2022). Thus, the present study adopts a phenomenographic-narrative approach and
explores language teachers’ appraisal (which here featured as perspectives) of emotionally charged situations and the
association with their identity construction.

1.1 Language teacher identity construction

Over the past two decades, there has been an exponential growth in theory and research on LTI construction. The
reason for such increased attention lies in the fact that identity is considered as fundamental to shaping teachers’
professional practice and sense of professionalism (Yazan, 2018). In this regard, the Douglas Fir Group (DFG) (2016)
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152 NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

argue that the three factors of identity, agency, and power are “all central in the learning and teaching of languages in
today’s multilingual world” (p. 36). Additionally, LTI is a multi-faceted construct that has roots in teachers’ historicity
and the present communities of practice they operate in, and is dialectically linked to their future self-perceptions
(Pennington & Richards, 2016; Yazan, 2018). Moreover, it is by now widely acknowledged that teachers are not just
content deliverers and by engaging in the practice of teaching, they construct identities that shape their thoughts,
performance, and sense of community membership (Karimi & Mofidi, 2019; Kayi-Aydar, 2019; Pennington & Richards,
2016; Yazan, 2018).
Within this conceptualization, LTI dynamically shapes and is shaped by the broad sociocultural idiosyncrasies,
institutional peculiarities, and personal aspects, and as De Costa and Norton (2017) state, LTIs “are cognitive, social,
emotional, ideological, and historical—they are both inside the teacher and outside in the social, material and techno-
logical world” (p. 3). LTIs are, in essence, a constellation of socio-historico-personal factors that dialectically contribute
to teachers’ agency, self-efficacy, motivation, emotions, knowledge, and beliefs (Bukor, 2014; Golombek & Doran,
2014; Kayi-Aydar, 2019; Yazan, 2018). A key component of LTI construction is emotions, which play a fundamental
role in teachers’ identity and practice (Wolff & De Costa, 2017). The current surge of attention to teacher emo-
tions and its role in identity construction has also been motivated by what has been called the emotional turn in
applied linguistics and particularly TESOL (Barcelos, 2015; De Costa et al., 2018), which emphasizes the centrality
of sociocultural–personal aspects in teachers’ professional development.

1.2 Language teacher emotions and identity

Emotions are a critical part of teacher identity construction as they are embedded within sociocultural contexts rife
with cultural and power discourses (Zembylas, 2007). Such discourses direct teachers’ emotions and may sanction
what Zembylas (2003) calls “emotional rules” (p. 196). As convincingly argued by Zembylas (2003), “teacher identity
is at bottom affective and is dependent upon power and agency” (p. 214). Within this line of argumentation, teaching
is characterized as embedded within multilingual and L1 communities of practice that socioculturally contribute to
teachers’ personalized sense-making of teaching and learning (Richards, 2020). A major part of conceptualizing teach-
ing as a social undertaking relates to teachers’ self-understandings, which are, in turn, intimately tied with how identity
is considered in the light of emotions. As posited by Song (2016, p. 633), “how teachers understand, experience, per-
form, and talk about emotions is closely relevant to their sense of self in relation to the sociocultural and institutional
context.”
Language teacher emotions have been studied from socio-political-educational perspectives and in light of con-
textualities shaping teachers’ emotional states. For example, Benesch (2017) views emotions as situated within the
macro-level political landscape of classrooms and argues for considering the emotional fluctuations that influence and
are influenced by gendered, sexual, and racial issues. In this regard, emotions are viewed as processes shaped by “regu-
lations, norms, habits, and conventions” (Benesch, 2020, p. 3) and are in close connection with a wide array of personal,
institutional, and sociocultural discourses operating in teachers’ (professional) life (Song, 2016). From a personal per-
spective, emotions are “a heightened state of being that changes” (Lasky, 2005, p. 901) and are tied to the personalized
sense-making of teachers’ situational understanding mingled with their previously developed emotional repertoire
(Benesch, 2017). Thus, language teacher emotions have personal and professional aspects that are in constant flux
and contribute to their professional identity and practice (De Costa et al., 2018).
Empirically speaking, there is a growing body of research on language teachers’ emotions and identities (Cheung &
Hennebry-Leung, 2020; Kocabaş-Gedik & Hart, 2021; Li, 2022; Song, 2016). For example, Song (2016) used narrative
inquiry and explored vulnerability in five South Korean teachers who changed their teaching context and narrated sto-
ries that showed their struggle to adapt to the new context. The teachers’ narratives indicated that their vulnerability
was marked by curricular and broad sociocultural peculiarities that both created fluctuations and helped them navi-
gate their professional development. Similar findings have been reported in Kocabaş-Gedik and Hart (2021) and Wolff
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NAZARI and KARIMPOUR 153

and De Costa (2017) regarding novice language teachers’ emotions that interact with sociocultural contextualities and
shape their emotion labor, constructed identities, and adopted strategies. Despite this growing body of knowledge,
scholarship on language teacher emotions has dominantly explored the nexus between emotions and identity con-
struction from a sociocultural perspective, and little is known about how teachers cognitively view emotions and their
complexities (Cheung & Hennebry-Leung, 2020; King & Ng, 2022).

1.3 Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives of teacher emotions

Research on teacher emotions has often taken two cognitive and sociocultural perspectives. The cognitive perspec-
tive is concerned with individuals’ appraisal of emotions in relation to their motivations and behavior (Lazarus, 1991).
Interpretations and appraisals are key to such a perspective, and especially for our purposes in this study, in that by
adopting methodological approaches that dig deep into teachers’ cognitions, we can gain “access to expressive pos-
sibilities that would not be possible without their presence” (Eisner, 2008, p. 5). For example, Abernathy (2010) used
prompts in the form of storybook to explore 180 pre-service and in-service teachers’ dispositions toward struggling
students in the story. The findings indicated that the teachers referred to overall impression, ownership of academic
challenges, and ownership of social challenges as the main three disposition types. The line of research on using
prompts to explore language teachers’ emotions has, however, received scant attention in the (second) language
teacher education literature. Moreover, Willis (2021) adopted a phenomenographic perspective and examined how
teachers working in cross-cultural institutions perceive student engagement. The study findings showed that teacher
emotions such as humility and compassion were central to students’ engagement.
On the other hand, the sociocultural perspective accounts for how emotions are constructed in light of culture,
history, and contextual particularities. In comparison to the cognitive perspective that is “focused on the cognitive
relation between the person and environment,” the sociocultural perspective captures how different individuals, con-
textualities, and interpersonal connections play a functional role in teachers’ emotional experiences (King & Ng, 2022,
p. 142). For example, Golombek and Doran (2014) adopted a sociocultural perspective in studying a novice teacher’s
lived experiences by analyzing her journals. The results of the study indicated a close tie between emotions, cognitions,
and activity in shaping the teacher’s prerezhivanie as a language teacher. Moreover, Safari (2020) adopted an arts-
based approach and explored Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers’ drawings of their identities. The
analysis of the drawings indicated that the teachers’ portrayals featured a complex web of sociocultural particularities
that were also emotion laden.

1.4 Theoretical framework

Recently, there has been a debate over the definition of identity as a cognitive or non-cognitive construct. On the
one hand, Borg (2019) has argued that because identity means self-understanding and understandings are classically
considered as part of cognition, identity is a sub-component of teacher cognition. He argues that “[p]erceptions and
understandings are obvious dimensions of teacher cognition, and so too, therefore, is teacher identity” (p. 19). On
the other hand, Burri et al. (2017) consider cognition and identity as complementary sides of teacher learning and
argue that “Borg’s (2012) claim of identity being part of cognition needs to be treated with caution” (p. 12). In the
present study, we examine both cognitive and social aspects of LTI by examining the participant teachers’ appraisal of
emotionally charged prompts and how emotions interact with contextual particularities to shape their identities. We
specifically selected emotions due to their stickiness in teacher identity construction and that they are inextricably
interconnected with the way teachers make sense of phenomena and their own self-perceptions (see Benesch, 2017;
De Costa & Norton, 2017). The approach we follow in the study is what we call phenomenographic narrative, as an
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154 NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

F I G U R E 1 The nexus between

language teacher emotions, perspectives,
and identity. [Color figure can be viewed
at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

approach that captures both teachers’ appraisal (here perspectives) and social nature of their identity construction
(see below).
In line with this theoretical stance, we examine the teachers’ perspectives (as the appraisal side) of emotion-
ally charged prompts and the associated relation to their own identity construction. Pratt (1992, p. 204) defined
perspectives as:

Specific meanings attached to phenomena which then mediate our response to situations involving those phe-
nomena. We form conceptions of virtually every aspect of our perceived world, and in so doing use those
abstract representations to delimit something from, and relate it to, other aspects of our world. In effect,
we view the world through the lenses of our conceptions, interpreting and acting in accordance with our
understanding of the world.

In this study, our operationalization of emotions is cognitively informed by Pratt’s (1992) conceptualization in cap-
turing the teachers’ appraisal in that the “meaning attached” to the emotionally charged prompts come to define
the teachers’ emotional perspectives in line with the phenomenographic dimension of the study. Additionally, Pratt
(1992) holds that perspectives have three components: intentions, actions, and beliefs. Our study addresses the beliefs
component in terms of why the situations “are considered to be important, reasonable and justifiable” (Oolbekkink-
Marchand, van Driel & Verloop, 2006, p. 595) in capturing the teachers’ associated appraisal. Moreover, we examine
and expand on the connection between the perspectives and the teachers’ own identity construction through the lens
of narrative to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the role of emotions in the teachers’ identity con-
struction. This conceptualization has been presented in Figure 1, which informed the data collection, analysis, and
findings of the study. Figure 1 demonstrates the connection between emotions, their cognitive resonances and roots,
and their association with teachers’ identity construction, which iteratively contribute to their subsequent emotional
experiences.
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NAZARI and KARIMPOUR 155

1.5 Purpose of the study

Much of the extant literature has not examined the role of both cognitive and social aspects of emotions in contribut-
ing to LTI construction (King & Ng, 2022), especially through situation-based methods. This point is important because
as Sachs (2005) argues, research has extensively examined the “how to be” and “how to act” of teacher identity con-
struction, yet the “how to understand” dimension of their emotions and identities has been little examined. Relatedly,
exploring language teachers’ emotional perspectives could be a conduit into their own emotional repertoire, which
helps unpack the role of such repertoire in their identity construction (Lasky, 2005; Zembylas, 2005). Moreover, it
is now widely acknowledged that research on teachers’ emotions should not only capture what emotions are, but
it should also account for what emotions do (see Benesch, 2017; Zembylas, 2003). This study aims to capture both
of these aspects. Thus, the study moves along the line of thinking on teacher emotion–identity nexus to examine
how teachers perceive emotionally charged situations (prompts) and how such situations relate to their own identity
construction. To address these gaps, the following questions were formulated:

1. How do language teachers perceive the emotionally charged prompts as relative to their understanding of identity?
2. How do the teachers narrate their own identity construction as relative to the emotionally charged prompts?

2 METHOD

2.1 Context and participants

This study was conducted in Iran. The Iranian EFL context generally offers two routes of language education through
formal schooling and language schools that are run privately. The number of teachers in the private sector is larger than
those in state schools. The approach followed in the private schools is exclusive to them and they plan and enact their
own policies. Additionally, these schools often use materials designed in native Anglophone countries, while the state
sector employs domestically designed materials by scholars from within the country. The curriculum of the private
schools is claimed to mirror the current conceptualizations of language teaching and learning such as communicative
language teaching and task-based language teaching (Authors, 2019). The learners attending language schools usually
follow four main purposes. A majority of the learners, the first group, want to improve their proficiency in different
skills and sub-skills for communication purposes. The second group view language classes as potential contributors to
a better performance in university matriculation exam. The third group involves learners who entertain the prospect
of studying abroad and attend intensive courses for IELTS, TOEFL, etc. The fourth group attend the language classes
due mainly to the pressure from parents or as a mere pastime.
Iranian L2 teachers include people from a wide range of educational backgrounds and can be categorized into four
groups. The first group includes teachers with credentials in TEFL, at the levels of BA, MA, or PhD. The second group
includes teachers who have received their degrees in majors other than, yet related to, English including Literature,
Translation, and Linguistics. The third group includes alternatively certified teachers who have chosen to pursue a
career in teaching due mainly to their (assumed) acceptable oral language proficiency. A more recent generation of
teachers are those who have completed a training in CELTA, DELTA, etc. courses, in countries other than their home
country. All the teachers are faced with various educational and sociocultural challenges ranging from low income,
job insecurity, high possibility of burnout, autonomy problems, high curricular restrictions and demands, to broader
socio-economic challenges.
As emotions are highly context sensitive, for this study, we recruited 17 teachers from different provinces of Iran
to obtain a representative collection of ideas regarding the connection between the teachers’ emotions and identity
construction. We selected the teachers through convenience and snowball sampling techniques. Table 1 indicates the
profile of the teachers.
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156 NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

TA B L E 1 The Teachers’ demographic information.

Teacher Age Experience (Year) Degree Gender Field of study Level of teaching
T1 32 11 MA Female TEFL Advanced
T2 35 13 MA Female TEFL Advanced
T3 40 18 PhD Male Applied Linguistics Advanced
T4 31 7 BA Female English Literature Intermediate
T5 33 8 MA Female TEFL Intermediate
T6 32 10 PhD Male Applied Linguistics Advanced
T7 32 12 MA Female TEFL Intermediate
T8 34 13 BA Female English Translation Advanced
T9 33 10 MA Male TEFL Advanced
T10 32 6 MA Female English Literature Intermediate
T11 25 4 BA Female English Translation Intermediate
T12 32 8 BA Female English Literature Intermediate
T13 32 9 MA Female English Literature Advanced
T14 33 10 MA Female TEFL Advanced
T15 25 4 BA Female English Translation Intermediate
T16 35 13 MA Male TEFL Advanced
T17 34 8 MA Female TEFL Intermediate

2.2 The phenomenographic-narrative approach

An ethnographic perspective featuring a socio-cognitive stance was utilized in the present study. The study qualita-
tively examined both cognitive and social dimensions of emotions in LTI construction. Literally meaning a “description
of appearance,” phenomenography is “the study of how people experience, understand or conceive of a phenomenon in
the world around them” (Larsson & Holmstrom, 2007, p. 56). Although phenomenography is often employed to study
variations in individuals’ understanding, Marton and Booth (1997) argue that it could be used to conceptualize how
individuals perceive phenomena. A key feature of phenomenography is that “[t]he object of investigation is not the
phenomenon itself . . . but the way people view the phenomenon” (Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2006, p. 600). This per-
spective is in close connection with the purpose of the present study as it aimed to examine how the teachers appraise
the emotionally charged prompts presented to them. Additionally, this approach is suitable for examining teachers’
perspectives as they could rely on their web of beliefs to represent their appraisal of the prompts (Pratt, 1992).
In order to explore the teachers’ personal sense-making of the emotionally charged prompts and the associated
connections to their own identity construction, we obtained the teachers’ narratives as a sequel to the prompts.
Ruohotie-Lyhty (2018) holds that with “its focus on individual activity, a narrative is well suited for researching the
individual side of teacher development” (p. 26). This perspective of narratives was operationalized via interviewing
the teachers (Barkhuizen, 2016) in obtaining their understanding of the prompts from their own lens. This approach
fits well with the approach taken in this study regarding the nexus between the teachers’ emotions, perspectives,
and identity (Golombek & Doran, 2014), as conceptualized in Figure 1. Additionally, the prompts could provide guid-
ance for the teachers in better recollecting their thoughts and the contribution of their experiences to the formation
of their present identity understanding (Kim & Klassen, 2018). Thus, a phenomenographic-narrative approach was
adopted in the study to examine the teachers’ perspectives of the emotionally charged prompts and to expand on their
own identity construction in light of the prompts. It must be emphasized that the cognitive and social dimensions of
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NAZARI and KARIMPOUR 157

emotion–identity nexus as featuring in the phenomenographic-narrative approach does not mean that teachers’ cog-
nitions and socially embedded emotions are different and distinct. Rather, as we show later, they are interrelated in
that teachers draw on their cognitive web to (re)interpret their sense-making of emotional phenomena and construct
their identities in light of emotionally laden contextualities.

2.3 Data collection

The first step in data collection was selecting the emotionally charged prompts, in line with what emotions are and the
phenomenographic approach of the study. Burke and Stets (2009) hold that emotions are generally categorized into
primary and secondary types. Primary emotions include happiness, fear, anger, and sadness, and secondary emotions
“stem from primary emotions and generally are conceptualized as a mixture of primary emotions” (p. 156). Our study
focused on the four primary emotions. To operationalize these emotions, we used insights from arts-based research
in using pictures to elicit the teachers’ perspectives (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2017). Thus, we selected four
pictures that represented the four emotions (Appendix A). We chose pictures that clearly represented the emo-
tion, were not highly loaded by additional cosmetics, and were representative of gender and racial variations (see
Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2017).
The pictures were presented to the teachers and they were asked to describe the picture, reason about the
major reasons that might have aroused the emotion in the teacher, and describe the prompt-related teachers’ self-
understanding. The teachers were then interviewed to describe the role of emotions in their own identity construction.
To this end, they were asked three questions (Appendix B) exploring the picture more similar to them, their identity
in resembling themselves to the picture, and their emotion and identity in the other three situations (what emo-
tions do). The design of the questions was informed by the three components indicated in Figure 1 (the connection
between the cognitive and social side of emotion–identity), the need to experiment with the larger ties in their narra-
tives (Barkhuizen, 2016; Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2018), and the importance of gaining complementary information about the
whole cognitive processing of teachers in prompt-based conditions (Kim & Klassen, 2018).

2.4 Data analysis

In line with the three-pronged conceptual framework of the study (Figure 1), the approach for analyzing the data was
guided by a perspective viewpoint and followed by narratives involving the teachers’ emotion–identity understand-
ing. This approach enabled us to characterize the teachers’ perspectives of the emotionally charged prompts and the
associated perceptions of LTI understanding, and to develop an inductive understanding of the teachers’ own identity
construction relative to the prompts. Regarding the perspectives, the teachers’ responses were first transcribed ver-
batim. These data were then read several times and the emerging categories were developed relative to each separate
question (Marton & Booth, 1997). As to the narratives, the teachers’ responses were analyzed thematically through
transcribing the responses, (re)reading them, developing the themes, and finalizing the storyline, based on Braun and
Clarke (2006). In this stage, the whole data were examined integratively in order to rule out the possibility of missing
the details and the complementary information. We also wrote down memos that gradually emerged from the data to
better conceptualize the details of the teachers’ understanding. The final components of the nexus between language
teacher emotions, perspectives, and identity construction have been represented in Figure 2.

3 FINDINGS

This section presents the findings of the study by first detailing the teachers’ perspectives of the emotionally charged
prompts (including the participant teachers’ beliefs about the prompt-related teachers’ identity) and then explaining
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158 NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

FIGURE 2 The components of language teacher emotions, perspectives, and identity.

the participant teachers’ emotions and identity construction (including the prompt the teachers associate with more,
how their emotions and identity interact in such circumstances, and how they narrate their emotions and identity in
the other three prompt-related situations).
Figure 2 indicates the connection between the teachers’ emotions, perspectives, and their relationship in shap-
ing the teachers’ identity construction. All of these components form the teachers’ identity-related emotional
understanding, which iteratively shapes their subsequent emotions.

3.1 Perspectives on the emotionally charged prompts

3.1.1 Beliefs about teacher identity

The analysis of the teachers’ responses indicated multiple characterizations of the prompt-related teachers’ emotions.
Two major queries were examined, namely the reasons for the emotion(s) and the prompt-related teachers’ identities.
Table 2 shows the teachers’ perspectives.
Table 2 indicates that the teachers presented various reasons that ranged from personal–psychological, pedagog-
ical, to institutional reasons for the prompt-related teachers’ emotions. For the first emotion, the participants mainly
referred to “disobedient learners” (both in personal misdemeanors and in dodging assignments) as the major source of
the teacher’s anger; they also referred to lack of congruence between the teacher’s expectations and classroom events
as another theme for the teacher’s anger. Such reasons were perceived as influencing the prompt-related teacher’s
self-understanding in viewing herself as a teacher incompetent in dealing with the students, as the authority in the
class, as a teacher who is responsible for students’ learning and thus being strict, and as a dissatisfied teacher whose
dissatisfaction/frustration extend to her classroom functioning. Regarding sadness, the teachers viewed personal
problems as the primary reason for the teacher’s emotion. Problems with classroom management, inadequate support
from school administrators, and the perceived lack of fit with the teaching profession were the other reasons. These
reasons were viewed as contributing to the teacher’s identity as a vulnerable teacher who is easily affected; feels
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NAZARI and KARIMPOUR 159

TA B L E 2 The teachers’ perspectives of the prompts.

Emotional state Perspectives

Anger Reason: disobedient learners (16); unfulfilled expectations (5); disrespect (4)
Identity: incompetent teacher (10); authority (3); responsible (2); dissatisfied (2)
Sadness Reason: personal problem (12); classroom management (5); lack of support at
school (2); not fitting teaching (1)
Identity: vulnerable teacher (9); incompetent teacher (5); failed teacher (2);
dissatisfied teacher (1)
Fear Reason: low self-confidence (7); lack of experience (7); lagging behind syllabus (5);
unexpected occurrence (3); not responding to student questions (2); classroom
mismanagement (1)
Identity: low self-regulating teacher (6); less-powerful teacher (5); impatient
teacher (3); dissatisfied teacher (3)
Happiness Reason: satisfaction with teaching (17); effective interpersonal relationships (15);
being experienced (7); being well-paid (4)
Identity: satisfied and competent teacher (13); recognized teacher (2) confident
and successful teacher (2)

incompetent as a professional teacher; sees herself as a failure in teaching; and is dissatisfied with her professional
practice in the school.
The prompt-related teacher’s fear was primarily attributed to his low self-confidence, followed by lack of experi-
ence, which induces fear in novice teachers. Inability to meet the curricular and syllabus requirements, an unexpected
classroom occurrence, inability to address students’ challenging questions, and inability to manage the class were the
other reasons for the teacher’s fear. Fear was viewed as an emotional state that makes the teacher perceive himself
as a person who struggles to regulate his emotions. Additionally, the teachers considered fear as a strong factor in the
teacher’s identity as a less-powerful, impatient, and dissatisfied teacher. Finally, all of the teachers regarded happiness
as a major function of satisfaction with teaching and of effective interpersonal relationships with the students. The
teachers considered experience and salary as important in the teacher’s happiness. Furthermore, the happy teacher’s
identity involved perceiving herself as a satisfied and competent teacher, as a person who receives due attention in the
school, and a teacher who has high self-confidence and is competent to practice effectively.

3.2 Emotions in the teachers’ identity construction

After the prompt-based responses, the teachers were asked to explain the picture that best chimed with their own
personality, the way it characterizes their identity, and the situations in which they experience the other emotional
states.

3.2.1 Emotional similarity

Thirteen teachers described themselves as similar to the happy teacher. Their major reason for this similarity was the
positive impacts of this emotion on the learners, the rapport needed to teach effectively, and the importance of cre-
ating firmer interpersonal connectivity with the learners by being happy: “I consider myself as a happy teacher as I enjoy
teaching. Teaching makes me feel useful and I enjoy the emotional bond that shapes between me and my learners as friends.
Most of the time we share our emotional experiences and exchange opinions, and try to suggest solutions to our problems”
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160 NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

(T2). In this extract, T2 views herself as a happy teacher who can create close emotional connections with the learners,
which is likely to lead to worthwhile outcomes extended to the social aspects of their lives as individuals.
Besides the positive effects of happiness on classroom occurrences, the self-perception of the teachers as happy
was linked to their attempts to craft the identity of a happy teacher, although happiness was not considered as their
real emotion in those circumstances. The teachers’ major reasoning for this fake identity was the substantial effect of
teacher emotions on the whole range of classroom events, from the learners’ emotions, to instructional effectiveness,
to classroom management, and to the quality of learning: “I usually try to have a smile on my face though I might have a
different feeling, because I believe the emotion on your face effects the teaching process” (T12). T15 made reference to the
importance of crafting a happy face due to its psychological effects on the learners: “Since I know being angry or sad as a
teacher is a push back for students so I try my best to be or (at least) look happy even if I don’t feel so.”
Among the 17 teachers, four teachers considered their personality as more similar to the angry teacher. Two
themes were central to these teachers’ anger emotions, namely, recognition and responsibility. To be recognized as
a professional teacher by the learners was defined at the service of improving learning outcomes as it could moti-
vate the learners to devote the effort required for learning: “I look like the first picture [angry] because, according to my
experience, if you’re strict and serious, students take you and your subject more seriously in any level you are teaching” (T4).
T8 emphasized that as she feels responsible for her work as a professional teacher, she is likely to get angry when her
expectations are not fulfilled in the class: “because I’m a quick-tempered person, when my students don’t do their homework,
don’t pay enough attention while I am teaching, or daydream in class, I get angry and sometimes overreact.”

3.2.2 Emotions in identity construction

One major reason that teachers likened themselves to the happy teacher was their agency and its contributions to
their self-image. The teachers held that happiness enables them to actualize their mental plans in effective ways and
that this emotion is more likely to create a learning-conducive classroom atmosphere: “I think if I appear as a happy
teacher, it will be monitored by the students. They’ll take me as an energetic teacher who is confident enough and has no
problem in the class because he knows what he wants to do and how he shall do that” (T6). In this extract, the teacher
points to the socio-psychological impacts of happiness on the learners, especially the learners’ recognition of him as
an energetic person, which serves to mediate the extent that he can move the class forward successfully. T1 pointed to
the contributions of happiness to her agency and self-image as a teacher, which in turn comes to shape her connection
with the learners: “As a happy teacher I see myself in a position who has the power to make most of the classroom decisions
and I have friendly relation with my learners and their parents. I ask for my learners’ opinion on how to engage them more and
make learning more captivating to them.”
The teachers’ happiness and its impacts on their agency was not restricted to their classroom-level emotions. They
argued that their agency and power to select their syllabus, methodology, and materials play an important role in their
happiness and subsequently in their identity construction. For example, T16 related happiness to his agency in content
selection and mastery, and referred to the associated impacts on his self-understanding as a successful teacher: “The
last picture shows me when I feel confident about the stuff I teach and my students listen to the instruction wholeheartedly.
When this feeling creeps over me I think of myself as a successful teacher who could keep the students entertained.” T6 made a
similar point in regard to her happiness and its role in her agency, which creates a positive self-image in her and makes
her feel autonomous: “I am more the happy teacher than the other ones in a class when there are no barriers from outside the
class in controlling the syllabus or methods I need to rely on. This makes me feel power and autonomy.”
The teachers who considered themselves as more similar to the angry teacher rationalized their emotion in light of
the multiplicity of their roles. For example, in the extract below, T14 states that as she has to play multiple roles, she
feels more like an angry teacher: “The first picture [angry] is more similar to my present situation of dealing with a toddler at
home, housekeeping (doing house chores), and working as a teacher at the same time.” T9 mentioned a similar reason for her
anger and made reference to the pressure of multiple social roles that make her lose her temper in certain situations:
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NAZARI and KARIMPOUR 161

“I have to be many things at the same time such as father, teacher, son, etc. I know that I should not mix my roles, but I am a
human being and when the class does not go on the way I want, sometimes I get angry.”

3.2.3 Identity construction in light of identity-related emotional understanding

One of the major indicators of the nexus between emotions, perspectives, and identity (as indicated in Figure 1) was
when the teachers were asked to explain their identity construction in non-similar emotional situations. Interestingly,
all of the teachers used the prompt-related teachers’ emotions to characterize their own emotion and identity. Itera-
tive analyses of their responses indicated that they attributed the prompt-related teachers’ emotions to the reasons,
emotional states, and identity construction that were fundamental to their own identity construction.
For example, in describing the reasons for the sad teacher’s emotional state in the prompt, T2 held that “she is not
satisfied with her working atmosphere. I think she must be under pressure by the institution or the parents.” When asked about
her own emotion in the other situations (other than happiness and anger), here sadness, the teacher stated that “I feel
sad when the managers interfere with my classroom teaching and tells me how to teach.” As another example, in describing
the scared teacher’s emotional state in the prompt, T6 reasoned that “he is scared maybe because it is his first experience
in the class and he is in fear that he cannot handle the class.” When asked about his own emotion in the other situations,
hear fear, the teacher held that “I become scared when I am not able to manage the students and the teaching process.” Such
examples indicate the tie between teachers’ beliefs and emotions, which collectively constitute their identity makeup.
The teachers also narrated stories that featured the contributions of emotions and beliefs to their identity con-
struction, which was perceived to shape their subsequent emotional states and perspectives. The key factor in this
cycle was reflectivity, which had two immediate and long-lasting colorings, and could sanction the teachers’ responses
to the emotional occurrences and define their sense-making of the events in the long run. For example, in the extract
below, T10 narrates the story of her first experience as a university teacher. She emphasizes the emotional tension she
had to undertake and mentions the effects of the experience on her self-confidence and mental states. She also holds
that she uses this experience “to handle [her] next classes” by reflecting on this emotional experience:

I remember the first day that I had a university class; the feeling was happiness along with “stress”; a
class full of guys older than me was so stressful for a person who has hitherto taught to kids and teens; in
that situation I tried to hide my true feeling and show myself relaxed and calm, despite my inner stress.
This feeling, at first, made me nervous, but after a few sessions I became confident and the stress was
gone. Now, when I think about this experience, I use it to handle my next classes.

In another narrative, T17 mentioned the effects of her physiological changes on her emotional fluctuations and
performance, which comes to profoundly influence her interpersonal identity:

I experience anger very much when my monthly period starts. I usually become angry and restless, and I really
become impatient when faced with the students. And when the students do not pay attention to what I say
and cooperate less, I become angry. I usually feel guilty in such situations but after a while when I think about
my behavior, I get calm.

In this narrative, the teacher explains how her menstrual period influences her emotional state and her relationship
with the students. She holds that by thinking about her behavior and anger, she attempts to regulate her subsequent
emotions. These emotions indicate the highly fluid nature of teachers’ emotions, which are not only influenced by their
historicity and sociocultural localities, but are highly contingent on their physiological and psychological states, and
shape the teachers’ identity relative to their markedness as within particular time frames.
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162 NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

4 DISCUSSION

Data analyses indicated that the teachers held complex perspectives on emotions and made sense of emotional states
in light of the socio-educational aspects of who they are. Reference to personal–psychological, institutional, and
pedagogical reasons for the prompt-related teachers’ emotions suggests that the teachers perceive emotions as inter-
linked with the socio-educational discourses and power relations that constantly mediate their emotional perspectives
(Benesch, 2020; Zembylas, 2003, 2007). Such reasons had two major features. First, the teachers viewed the reasons
as sanctioning the whole range of classroom occurrences (Cheung & Hennebry-Leung, 2020) and teachers’ institu-
tional sense-making (Pennington & Richards, 2016; Yazan, 2018), which extend to their personal and psychological
statuses (Benesch, 2018). Their understanding of the prompt-related teachers’ identities was also related to these
reasons, yet the understanding featured what Burke and Stets (2009) term “person and role identities.” That is, the
teachers’ identities were largely defined relative to the lens that was central in our teachers’ understanding of identity
from personal and professional dimensions. This conceptualization of identity was also fundamental to the teachers’
own characterization of identities, which shows that they make sense of others’ identities in light of their own self-
understanding. This finding resonates with scholarship on the interconnection between teacher cognition, emotion,
and interpretation (Barcelos, 2015; Golombek & Doran, 2014), yet adds to this scholarship by showing how the par-
ticipant teachers’ own history, knowingly or unknowingly, played out as determining in the way they made sense of
prompt-related teachers’ emotional states.
Second, we found no two teachers interpreting the prompts uniformly, and even in the cases of similar reasons
for the prompt-related emotions, they provided different explanations for the reasons. Relatedly, the prompt-related
teachers were described in ways that were highly difficult to be differentiated from the other similar representa-
tions conveying otherwise different meanings. This finding attests to the highly changing nature of teachers’ emotions
and their inextricable tie with how teachers form emotional meanings in light of their idiosyncratic cognitive makeup
(Lasky, 2005). Golombek and Doran (2014) situate this perspective within the larger framework of sociocultural the-
ory and speak of lived experiences, which come to profoundly shape teachers’ emotions and their person-specific
emotional sense-making. In line with Pratt’s (1992) argument for perspectives as “specific meanings attached to
phenomena” (p. 204), these two features show that meaning, for our teachers, involved discourses that define their
emotions and perspectives, and are rooted in their sociohistorical background (Borg, 2019).
The teachers’ tendency to liken themselves to the happy and angry teachers shows that these emotions are more
deeply defined in their mindset to shape their interpersonal relationships, especially with the students. In this regard,
the happy teachers underscored the significance of happiness in their relationships with the students, specifically
crafting a fake identity to move the class forward. The teachers’ attitude indicates their commitment in that they
intend to verify their understanding of themselves as a happy teacher, which is a heuristic for their interpersonal
connectivity (Burke & Stets, 2009). Similarly, the teachers’ tendency toward emotional similarity with anger was at
the service of exercising their power to align the classroom events with their own personal and professional require-
ments. In this regard, along with the DFG (2016), Benesch (2017, 2020), and Zembylas (2007) who view power
within its sociocultural landscape, for the teachers of this study, power was defined in emotional terms, which could
have relevant post-structural and sociocultural roots. However, these findings add to the literature by showing that
the antecedent of teachers’ happiness and anger emotions reside in their personal commitment and agency-bearing
implications in that such emotions are both a reflection of their internal identity-related states and a manifold of
agency-related external action. This point could also be a fertile ground for further research in examining the meaning
of power for teachers’ emotional responses and the connection between power, emotional understanding, and identity
construction.
The teachers’ reasons for associating happiness with agency was a marked feature of their identity construction.
This finding corroborates the argument as to the determining role of emotions in teachers’ professional practice (De
Costa et al., 2018; Nazari & De Costa, 2022; Richards, 2020; Wolff & De Costa, 2017; Yazan, 2018), especially in light
 14734192, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijal.12455 by Fudan University, Wiley Online Library on [12/05/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
NAZARI and KARIMPOUR 163

of curricular issues (Song, 2016). The central point here was not the teachers’ inability to exercise their agency in light
of the other emotions—except possibly for fear; rather, happiness was viewed as an emotional state that increases the
possibility of implementing effective practices. Similarly, the angry teachers’ emphasis on the multiplicity of their roles
in sanctioning their emotional state situates anger within a broader spectrum of factors shaping teachers’ emotional
responses (Golombek & Doran, 2014; Wolff & De Costa, 2017) and indicates the influence of other competing dis-
courses on teachers’ emotional experiences (Benesch, 2017; Zembylas, 2003, 2007). Indeed, while the happy teachers
adhered to teaching-related reasons for their happiness, the angry teachers went beyond teaching and emphasized the
effect of their social roles on arousing anger in them. These findings show that while teachers’ positive emotions may
be dependent on specific contextualities, their negative emotions may easily connect to other contexts to (re)shape
the emotion and its relevant manifestations.
The highly personalized nature of emotions was evident from the teachers’ interpretations of their own emotions
as contributing to their identity construction. They attributed reasons to the prompt-related teachers’ emotions that
were later (in the second section of data collection) found to undergird their own emotions and identities. Indeed,
the teachers used their own emotional understanding to describe their perspective of the prompt-related teachers’
emotions. This understanding was conjured up as a lens through which they recursively shaped their own identity con-
struction. This finding reveals that besides interpreting their identity in emotional terms, teachers attach their own
emotional understanding to other teachers’ emotions and identity. This emotional understanding was also a significant
feature of the teachers’ narratives (Barkhuizen, 2016) in that they perceived their present identity in light of emotional
experiences mediated by their cognitive contemplation. Reflectivity was considered as the key to regulating their emo-
tional responses and reconstructing their identity and identity understanding. Along these lines, it seems that not only
are emotions a significant part of teachers’ identity, but this interconnectivity cannot exist without cognitive processes
that shape and are shaped by their identity-related emotional understanding.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This study adopted a phenomenographic-narrative approach to examine Iranian L2 teachers’ responses to emotionally
charged prompts and the association with their own identity construction. The results of the study indicated that the
teachers make sense of emotions in highly complex ways that are connected to their personal, professional, and socio-
cultural understandings. Emotions were not only viewed as central to the teachers’ understandings of identity, but
they also tended to extend this understanding to the way they perceived the prompts. The findings of the study offer
new perspectives on the complexity of emotions in teachers’ professional practice and their socio-cognitive nature.
This complexity needs to be taken into account by teacher educators to examine the role of power relations and socio-
cultural discourses sanctioning teachers’ emotions and professional identity (Fairley, 2020; Wolff & De Costa, 2017;
Zembylas, 2007).
The study offers implications to the debate over the status of identity within the present discussions of language
teacher development, as mentioned at the beginning of this paper. It seems that the debate is more of terminological
instrumentalism than one of characterizing the complexity of LTI construction. While the Borgian conceptualization
captures the here-and-now definition of identity as part of teacher cognition, the camp favoring social perspectives
captures the socio-historic-introspective nature of identity. Of particular note here is that Borg (2019) defines teacher
cognition research as “Inquiry which seeks, with reference to their personal, professional, social, cultural and historical
contexts, to understand teachers’ minds and emotions and the role these play in the process of becoming, being and
developing as a teacher” (p. 20). Although Borg does not clearly use the term “identity” in his definition, he seems
to define teacher cognition in identity terms. We acknowledge Borg’s use of emotions as a conduit into the nexus
between cognitive processes, emotions, and identity. In this sense, holistic approaches that conceptualize cognition
and identity as complementary forms of teachers’ professional practice seem to be more promising (see, e.g., Barcelos,
2015).
 14734192, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijal.12455 by Fudan University, Wiley Online Library on [12/05/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
164 NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

As we observed, emotions are so complex and determining in LTI construction that we believe they should receive
more focal attention in contributions like the DFG (2016). Such an attention, however, demands ontological and epis-
temological rationales that pave the way for further theory and research on the link(s) between emotions and identity,
given the infancy of the former in applied linguistics. This link could be little established without attending to the
cognitive side of teachers’ emotions, as emotions are highly person specific and contingent upon a wide array of medi-
ating factors (Lasky, 2005). Haviland and Kahlbaugh (1993) called emotions as the “glue” of identity and the major
constituents of this glue could arguably be teachers’ sense-makings and perspectives. In light of this argument, we
believe that instead of dichotomizing identity, it would be more helpful to conceptualize the iterative and evolving ring
between personal and social dimensions of emotions and the associated connections to LTI construction.
The findings of the present study should be interpreted in light of its limitations. First, we only examined the
beliefs component of Pratt’s (1992) conceptualization. Exploring intentions and actions could open up new avenues for
research on teachers’ emotional sense-making and its role in their identity construction. Second, our study addressed
the four primary emotions of anger, sadness, fear, and happiness. Future research should examine the role of secondary
emotions in teachers’ identity construction, especially that we approached identity only from the emotional lens and
other dimensions of identity (e.g., agency, motivation, self-efficacy, and self-esteem) were not examined. Third, what
we really desired to address, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic we could not, was examining the four emotions in the
teachers’ classes. Further research should couple teachers’ emotional perspectives with their emotional responses to
better conceptualize the complexity and dynamicity of teacher emotions. We hope that this study could provide more
insights into the role of teachers’ cognitions in their emotions and, in turn, in their identity construction.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

FUNDING INFORMATION
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data for this study is available upon request.

ORCID
Mostafa Nazari https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1087-126X
Sedigheh Karimpour https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0048-3762

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How to cite this article: Nazari, M., & Karimpour, S. (2023). Emotions, perspectives, and English language
teacher identity construction: A phenomenographic-narrative study. International Journal of Applied Linguistics,
33, 150–168. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijal.12455
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NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

Picture prompts
APPENDIX
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168 NAZARI and KARIMPOUR

Interview questions

1. Which of the pictures (teachers) resonates with you and your personal history more? Why? In what situations?
2. How does the picture you identify with describe you as a teacher? How and what do you think about yourself in
that situation?
3. In what situations do you experience other emotions? How do you feel and define yourself in those situations? How
do they influence your thoughts about yourself?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Mostafa Nazari is a lecturer at Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran. His area of interest is second language teacher
education and he has published in Computer Assisted Language Learning, RELC Journal, TESOL Journal, etc.

Sedigheh Karimpour is an assistant professor of applied linguistics at Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences,
Sari, Iran. She has been working as a lecturer in Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences since 2010. Her
research interests include English for specific purposes, English for academic purposes, conversation analysis,
teacher identity, and teacher emotions.