Making sense of emotion and identity construction through metaphors: a prompt-based study in an English as a Foreign Language context.

The study of teachers’ cognitive processes has received considerable attention in the past decades. However, the scope of research on the way teachers cognitively represent and understand emotions and how such representations relate to the sociocultural particularities shaping their identities demands further attention. Inspired by the phenomenographic approach, the present study sought to examine how Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers represent emotionally charged prompts through metaphors. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews in which 17 EFL teachers were asked to represent fear, sadness, anger, and happiness emotions through metaphors. The analysis of the qualitative data indicated that the teachers used metaphors that instantiated the interconnection between emotions and sociocultural particularities of teaching. Moreover, despite the exclusive directionality of the metaphors used to characterise sadness, fear, and happiness, the teachers described anger bi-modally via both positive and negative metaphors. The findings of the study emphasise the mediating role of contextual idiosyncrasies in shaping the metaphors teachers draw on to characterise emotions. These findings may have some significant implications for teacher educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]