Emotional and Cognitive Dissonance of Teachers of Japanese as a Foreign Language Towards Technology-Mediated Language Teaching Curriculum: A Perezhivanie Perspective

In new paradigms, teachers’ cognition and emotion must be considered dialectically shaped co-evolving processes. To address the issue, the study examined how language teachers’ perezhivaniya (plural form of perezhivanie, a concept from Sociocultural Theory that describes a unity between cognition and emotion) developed. During a semester (17 weeks), a study of 13 teachers of Japanese as a foreign language was conducted at a university in northeast China. Narrative inquiry was used to collect perezhivaniya excerpts from retrospective diaries, reflection diaries, and interviews. Q-methodology was also employed to group participants based on their cognitive and emotional changes toward technology-mediated language teaching (TMLT). In our study, teachers’ negative perezhivaniya resulted from a lack of affordances for online and hybrid education in professional development. Teachers experienced many dramas (unit of analysis of perezhivaniya) as they adapted to TMLT. Conversely, teachers’ positive perezhivaniya originated from teacher agency and developed through affordances offered by the sociocultural community. We also found teacher perezhivaniya changed in three staged patterns: resistance and demotivation (during large-scale offline teaching before the pandemic), obligation and adaptation (during large-scale online teaching during the pandemic), and inventiveness and motivation (during online and offline blended teaching after the pandemic). In conclusion, we identified teachers’ perezhivaniya developed in a dynamic, historical, complex as well as multi-layered (with time-developmental, drama-historical, and SSD-social as indicators) pattern.