Strategies for emotional regulation of children in learning to write in class and interview situations

Abstract

Learning to write involves the challenge to understand and regulate one’s own emotions in situation, such as frustration, anxiety and different moods. In recent years, the study of emotion regulation in children through different methodological tools, such as interviews, questionnaires or observations, has increased. However, to date there are few studies that complement these techniques. The present study seeks to contribute to early emotion regulation in learning to write from a sociocultural, ecological and situated approach, through the combination of interviews and class observations. The aims are to: (1) identify emotionally challenging events in children’s learning to write; (2) describe the deployment of their strategies of emotion regulation; and (3) analyze the variation of these strategies in class and interview situations. Participants were 10 first graders from a school located in the urban area at San Carlos de Bariloche (Argentina). The school was selected because communication and regulation of emotions is part of the educational project. Observations of language classes and individual interviews were conducted over Zoom in the COVID-19 pandemic context. Ten observations focused on the class interaction between the teacher and children in learning to write situations were analyzed. The individual interview is based on video-elicitation technique. Three videos were designated ad hoc. Each video elicited emotionally challenging events in learning to write: (1) the awareness of a gap between knowledge/power and the demands of a task (child represented difficulties in writing and erasing, showing emotional affectation); (2) social exposure (child was reading alone and an adult asked her about what she was reading, after which the girl looked down and pursed her lips); and (3) the distracting environment (two girls were chatting and making noise as two boys were writing in their notebooks). Beyond the three emotionally challenging events presented in the video-elicitation, another four were found: the adaptation to external norms, the revision of the own text, the difficulty with the material, and the acknowledge the own mistakes. Additionally, children deployed a wide repertoire of strategies according to the emotion regulation model of Gross (2015) and the specific literature. Overall, the most frequent strategies were the modification of the situation in a social way, communication and expression. In the observations, modification of the situation in physical form, control and private speech were found. In the interviews, the alternative activity, breathing, communication and cognitive reappraisal were observed. Finally, it was concluded that the complementation of research methods, class observations and interviews, is promising for the study of children’s emotion regulation in learning to write.