Alipour, Shahrzad

EFL Teachers’ Anxiety, Empathy, and Emotion Regulation Strategies with a Focus on Students’ Perception of Teacher’s Emotions

AbstractThis research was an attempt to investigate the relationship among EFL teachers twoemotion regulation ER strategies i e Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression and their anxiety ER strategies and teachers empathy and also to find the relationshipbetween students perception of teachers emotions and teachers self report of their ERstrategies The participants of this study were 250 university EFL teachers and 500 universitystudents Teachers were chosen purposefully from a number of state and Islamic Azaduniversities including University of Isfahan Isfahan University of Technology IsfahanUniversity of Medical Science Sheikh Bahaei University Shiraz University JahromUniversity Islamic Azad Universities of Najafabad and Khorasgan and Students wereselected according to their availability from the whole population of each teacher s classes To collect data four questionnaires were used including Emotion Regulation StrategyQuestionnaire Gross and John 2003 Teaching Anxiety Scale Parsons 1973 and TorontoEmpathy Questionnaire Spreng 2009 which were administered to teachers also students perception of teacher s emotions Jiang 2016 was used for students and an open endedTeachers Emotion Regulation Strategy by Sutton 2004 was utilized for semi structureinterview In order to analyze the data Pearson Correlation confirmatory factor analysis composite reliability and deductive template approach were used According to the results there was a negative significant relationship between teachers CRand their anxiety level Also there was a positive significant relationship between teachers ES and their anxiety level Furthermore a positive significant relationship was revealedbetween teachers ES and their empathy level Some differences were also found betweenteachers significant emotions and students perception of teachers emotions in that studentsperceived more positive emotions from their teachers The findings of this study can helpEFL teachers to have a good understanding of their emotions in classroom which may effecton students perception of their teachers emotions and students learning This study canhelp teachers to promote regulating their emotions while they are empathetic or anxious intheir classes Keywords Anxiety empathy emotion regulation cognitive reappraisal expressive suppression perception strategy vi