Emotions, perspectives, and English language teacher identity construction: A phenomenographic‐narrative study

Abstract Despite the recent surge of interest in language teacher emotions, little research has examined the role of cognitive and social dimensions of teachers’ emotions in their identity construction. Adopting a phenomenographic‐narrative approach, the present qualitative study examined the connection between English language teachers’ perspectives, emotions, and identities. Seventeen Iranian English teachers 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 reasons underlying power relations and competing discourses shaping their own emotions and identities. Moreover, the teachers narrated stories that were perceived as dynamically 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.