Due to the impact of COVID-19, most Chinese universities have launched livestream teaching. Faced with this significant change of teaching mode, teachers experienced different emotions, including predominant negative emotions such as anxiety, stress, and anger, alongside a few positive emotions like satisfaction, love, and happiness. With the rising attention on teacher emotion research, this study explores the emotional experiences of five Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in livestream teaching. Drawing from data collected via interviews and case documents, it examines the causes of these teachers’ emotions and the impact thereof on their sustainable professional development. The findings suggest that teacher emotions were produced through the interaction between teachers’ goals and the environment, which included students’ performance, features of livestream teaching, and the institutional livestream teaching requirements. The impacts of teacher emotions on their sustainable professional development were identified: deepening teachers’ understanding of online teaching, shaping teacher identities, and motivating teachers to take action. Implications regarding developing teachers’ coping strategies for various emotions and sustaining their professional development in online teaching are also included.

Despite the increasing interest in teacher agency in the field of language teacher psychology, little attention has been paid to how language teachers enact their agency in an under-resourced environment. To address the research gap, this narrative study explored how a secondary English as a foreign language teacher in Western China enacted his agency for professional development and identified its sources. The findings revealed that this teacher enacted his agency through passionate exploration of adaptive teaching and continuous investment in autonomous learning. His agency was attributed to the interplay of his past experiences, long-term goals, teaching beliefs, and the challenging working environment. Consequently, implications for teacher agency research and practice are discussed.

This case study draws a specific link to the practice of action learning (AL) in China. We organized ourselves into an AL set and used Revans’ AL, as interpreted by Marquardt ( 2004 Marquardt, Michael J. 2004. Optimising the Power of Action Learning. Palo Alto, CA: Davis-Black. [Google Scholar] ), to create a post-teaching dialog to examine the experience gained from delivering an interdisciplinary course online—a novice situation—in a Chinese transnational university. AL’s questioning insight occurred after conducting an evidence-based evaluation of online teaching in an interdisciplinary higher education course that used Debattista’s ( 2018 Debattista, Martin. 2018. “A Comprehensive Rubric for Instructional Design in E-Learning.” The International Journal of Information and Learning Technology 35 (2): 93–104. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ) online teaching effectiveness rubric. The rubric offered rich ‘programed knowledge’ that triggered our question-based inquiry. We conclude that our AL approach is valuable for teacher professional development and offers our rationale for why this particular AL practice would be suitable for the Confucian culture, teaching of interdisciplinary courses, and in novice situations. By conducting AL, we identified a list of key findings, such as proactive communication among teachers in an interdisciplinary course, was vital when teaching to a large group of students. We offer recommendations to improve interdisciplinary online course design and delivery in the future based on reflections from the AL. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of this paper.

People have different attitudes toward taking professional training courses online despite the post-pandemic movement towards e-learning in adult education. Limited studies have linked adult learners’ emotions with their attitudes towards technology (i.e., technology acceptance) and investigated their impacts on adult learners’ engagement in online professional development. This study aims to fulfil this gap by testing the mediating effect of technology acceptance between learning-related emotions and online learning engagement in professional development, and the moderating effect of emotion regulations therein. The study draws on the theoretical grounding from Control-Value Theory, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), and the Process Model of Emotion Regulation. After collecting data from 254 higher education faculty through an online questionnaire, the study applied a partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) for its results. The findings show that learning-related emotions are associated with technology acceptance and emotion regulation moderates those associations. Furthermore, the results suggest that technology acceptance mediates between learning-related emotions and online learning engagement. These findings strengthen the need to attend to affect in adults’ online learning and stress the importance of emotion in embracing technology for enhancing learning engagement among adult learners.

Teacher education research has recognised the importance of teacher resilience. However, the development of language teacher-researchers resilience remains in its early stages. To address this gap, this study adopted a qualitative approach to explore the resilience development of two Chinese secondary school English teacher-researchers and its contributing factors. Data from interviews and case documents indicated that teacher-researchers resilience was dynamic and developed over time. Two different patterns of resilience development were identified: low-to-high and W-shaped recovery. Furthermore, individual and environmental factors and their interactions jointly contributed to the resilience development of the two secondary school English teacher-researchers. Their participation in classroom research provided them with diverse ways to sustain their resilience. The implications for teacher development are offered to teachers in China and other similar contexts.