Cognitive, Emotional, And Communicative Dimensions of Efl Speaking Experiences: A Transitivity Analysis of Pre-Service Teachers’ Reflective Narratives

This study study how reflective narratives written by undergraduate EFL teacher candidates about learning to speak English can be analysed through the transitivity system of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). A descriptive qualitative case study design is specified for ten narratives and four supporting interviews from fifth-semester students of an English Education Study Program in Indonesia (2025–2026). Narratives are segmented into clauses and coded for process type, participant role, circumstance, and theme; a second coder re-codes a stratified 30% subset. In the illustrative corpus of 151 clauses, relational (24.5%), verbal (23.2%), and material (22.5%) processes were almost equally frequent, followed by mental (18.5%), behavioural (9.3%), and existential (2.0%) processes. Activities were construed mainly materially, cognition mentally, interaction verbally, and self-evaluation relationally, whereas emotion appeared more often as relational Attributes and behavioural responses than as mental processes. These figures illustrate the reporting procedure and must be re-established with authentic archived data before any empirical claim is made. The design suggests that analyses of learner affect should not rely on mental processes alone