Teacher Beliefs and Implications of Emotional Scaffolding from EFL Teachers – A Voice from Chinese EFL Writing Class

Teacher beliefs include teachers understanding, assumptions, and content of classroom teaching, but also affect methods of teaching support on emotional dimension. Considering previous literature have examined it with in different countries and language skills, this research attempt to ex-amines the interplay between teacher beliefs and practices of emotional scaffolding in the context of Chinese EFL writing instruction. The present study shall adopt qualitative research methods to yield a depth under-standing. 10 in-service Chinese college writing instructors were grounded with a semi-structured interview, which explores how teachers’ belief sys-tems shape their affective pedagogical approaches in writing classrooms. All the data was analyzed by theme coding. The findings showed respond-ents hold multifaceted beliefs about effective writing pedagogy. Additional-ly, the role of emotion in writing instruction was recognized by majority of teachers with efforts on striving to foster motivation, confidence, and a supportive classroom climate through various emotional scaffolding strat-egies. In line with the strategies, the teachers applied specific techniques that teachers use to engage and support learners emotionally. In the mean-time, there were still some challenges teachers faced such as exam-driven curricula, large class sizes, and cultural expectations which hinder the suc-cess implication of affective support. The present work sheds light on un-derexplored connections between teacher cognition and affective peda-gogy voice from Chinese English writing instruction classroom. It also dis-cusses implications for teacher development, suggesting that enhancing teachers’ feedback literacy and emotional scaffolding skills can improve EFL writing outcomes.