"Is He Happy or Sad?" Emotion Talk in Rural Chinese Classroom: A Case Study

• In Event: Understanding the Dynamics of Low-Resource Early Childhood Education Settings in Rural China

Abstract

Objectives and theoretical framework

Children develop their social and emotional skills rapidly during the early stage of life, which lay the foundation for their later social and emotional competency. Practicing emotion talk, that is, deliberate statements about emotions and their causes and consequences, is one way for adults to foster children’s emotional development (Denham, Bassett, & Wyatt, 2007). However, most of the past research on emotion talk has been done in family setting or in emotion-based intervention that, limited study is conducted to investigate how teachers and children interact using emotion talk in daily classroom setting (Yelinek & Grady, 2019). Even fewer focuses on population in the non-Western context. Therefore, the present case study aims to explore emotion talk in Chinese rural OVOP classrooms, where the topic has never been researched before. We address three research questions: the frequency of rural Chinese teachers having emotion talk in classroom activity, types of emotion utterances identified by those teachers, and the differences in their emotion teaching strategies.

Methods

Four out of 80 classroom recordings and transcripts of classroom shared storybook reading activities from the Xichou OVOP site, a poverty-striven county in southwest China, were used in qualitative analysis. First, using the transcripts, we identified the frequency of four basic emotion utterances in Mandarin, “happy”, “sad”, “angry”, and “fear”, brought up by all teachers. Second, adopting the coding scheme named Parent-Child Affect Communication Task (Denham, Cook, & Zoller, 1992), we coded and categorized teacher’s affect in emotion talk into two types, affectively positive and affectively negative, with five functions, comment, explain, question, guide, and socialization. Lastly, we used grounded theory to find differences in teachers’ strategies to engage children in emotion talk.

Results

Overall, we find emotion talk extremely rare in Xichou OVOP classrooms. Using different materials, four teachers showed similarities and differences in emotion teaching strategies. Affectively positive emotions were brought up more by the teachers, whereas affectively negative emotions were used more in in-depth discussion with children. Comment and question were the two frequent methods teachers used to approach emotions, with socialization the least often. Teachers asked more engaging open-ended questions when they explain the emotions, and they tend to guide students to act out negative emotions more. Learning outcomes and student engagement varied as teachers varied in their emotion teaching strategies.

Significance

This case study identifies four rural Chinese teachers’ current practices in approaching emotion talk in the classrooms. Some of the useful emotion teaching strategies can guide other teachers working in the similar context. Because of the uniqueness of the research topic, findings from the current study contribute to the literature gap in studying how teachers and students interact with emotion talk in natural classroom setting. This study also advocates placing more emphasis on early childhood social and emotional development in rural areas in the future policy-making process. It is recommended for the future endeavor to develop appropriate scaffolding for rural teachers to use in classrooms to further promote children’s social and emotional competency.

Authors

• Skyler Yin, Harvard University

• Zhuo Feng, Harvard Graduate School of Education