Chinese and British Teachers’ Emotional Reactions Towards Students’ Classroom Behaviours

The primary objective of this research is to investigate whether Chinese instructors who work in the UK experience different emotions in comparison with British instructors when facing students’ disruptive behaviour. With the increase of the globalization, lager numbers of teachers are teaching abroad (Weber, 2007). Working as international teachers, this group of teachers’ built-in beliefs and cultural values may be challenged by the new cultural context in which they work (Hofstede, 1986; Volet & Ang, 1998). Moreover, according to appraisal theory, when judging an antecedent to an emotion, a person’s cultural beliefs and goals are drawn on (Lazarus, 1991; Frijda, 1986); as such, it can be assumed that, compared with local teachers, international teachers may experience different or more intense emotions due to their different beliefs and goals when they both confront the same students’ behaviours (Sutton & Wheatley 2003). In order to examine this assumption, three phases of studies (a questionnaire survey with video scenarios, a diary study and interviews) were designed. The questionnaire survey with video scenarios of classroom misbehavior contained 47 Chinese and 52 British instructors/teachers as participants and discovered that teachers from China experienced a significantly higher level of anxiety and shame than British teachers. Interestingly, there is a trend showing that British instructors perceived students’ misbehaviours were more troublesome than Chinese instructors, however, when they watched the video clips their emotional reactions to those behaviours in the classroom are less intensive than that of Chinese instructors in general. Finally, according to results from interview study, the depth of tolerance, accountability and teacher’s self-efficacy could be factors that result in these differences discovered between British and Chinese instructors.