“Navigating joy and pressure”: emotion regulation among Chinese secondary school EFL teachers in the high-stakes testing context

Teachers’ emotions have increasingly become a significant topic in research on language teacher development, yet relatively little is known about how these emotions emerge and are regulated in high-stakes testing environments. In contexts where examination pressure shapes classroom practices and professional expectations, teachers often encounter emotionally demanding situations that require ongoing regulation. This study aims to explore secondary school English teachers’ emotions, specifically, the antecedents of these emotions, and the underlying mechanisms of emotion regulation in the high-stakes testing context. Seventy-two teachers participated in the study, and data were collected through narrative frames and semi-structured interviews. Through content analysis, patterns and recurring themes were identified. The findings showed that teachers experienced a range of emotions shaped by teacher-student interactions, relationships with students’ parents and colleagues, and non-instructional duties. The study further identified five categories of emotion-regulation strategies encompassing twenty sub-strategies, thereby illustrating how teachers regulated their emotions. This study advances an ecological cycle model for understanding teacher emotion regulation and offers practical implications for teacher professional development and the construction of emotional support systems.