The role of emotions in reflective teaching in second language classrooms: Felt sense, emotionality, and practical knowledge acquisition

Abstract

There is a global consensus that teachers should be trained and educated with much emphasis on practical knowledge. Acquiring practical knowledge can mean learning how to become a creative professional in a global context. Unlike theoretical knowledge, however, it is hard, if not impossible, to verbalize personal practical knowledge, which often makes it difficult for teachers to efficiently share practical knowledge in their communities of practice. We, therefore, opted to focus on L2 teachers’ emotionality, more specifically, “felt sense” (i.e., a combination of emotion, awareness, intuitiveness, and embodiment) perceived by pre-service teachers during teaching practica, and to investigate the process of verbalization of “felt sense.” We expected to clarify the acquisition and transformation process of L2 teachers’ practical knowledge, as well as the relationships between L2 teacher emotions and reflective teaching. This chapter will address crucial issues of methodological approaches in L2 teacher education research and discuss major research findings of our collaborative qualitative research, focusing on the analyses of three different data sets: interviews, L2 poetry writing, and autobiographical narrative. This research is supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research (Project No. 15K12913) awarded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).