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This study investigates the role of perezhivanie, a concept introduced by Vygotsky, in shaping learner identity in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education. By adopting a holistic perezhivanie framework integrating environmental factors, personal characteristics, and the refraction prism for experience interpretation, it reveals how learners’ identities are shaped by macro-situational and micro-level events. Focusing on two first-year Chinese college students (Tao and Li), it explores how their emotional and cognitive language-learning engagements influence identity evolution. Examining their high school-to-university transitions, it highlights the dynamic interplay between personal characteristics and environmental factors, emphasizing cognition-emotion integration in identity formation. Findings show learner identities are non-static, evolving via complex individual-environment and cognitive-emotional interaction. This study addresses a research gap by integrating psychological and social perspectives on identity formation, offering new insights into underexplored mechanisms of Chinese EFL learner development.
Hong et al. (Thu,) studied this question.