Exploring master’s students’ emotions and emotion-regulation in supervisory feedback situations: a vignette-based study

Abstract

Following a sociocultural perspective, this vignette-based study explored Chinese master’s students’ emotions and emotion-regulation strategies in supervisor writing feedback situations. An instrument contained 17 vignettes was developed, validated and administered among 189 participants. Individual interviews with five participants were also conducted, and written materials were collected. The findings revealed that across the 17 hypothetical scenarios, positive emotion was the most reported emotional status, and Chinese master’s students would be more likely to feel grateful, hopeful and excited, while contemptuous, bored and angry were the least reported. This study also identified a set of emotion-regulation strategies (i.e. task-related regulation, response regulation, cognitive regulation, attention deployment, co-regulation, and general response) used by students in handling their emotions in supervisory feedback situations. This study provides insights into the emotional dimension of supervisory feedback practices and concludes with pedagogical implications to enhance the wellbeing of postgraduate students in learning academic writing.

Keywords:

• Supervisory feedback
• academic writing
• emotion regulation
• writing assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chunhong Liu

Chunhong Liu is a PhD student at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His major research interests include EFL writing, discourse analysis, and English for Academic Purposes. His research has been published in journals like Assessing Writing, Journal of Second Language Writing, and English for Specific Purposes.

Shulin Yu

Shulin Yu is Associate Professor at Faculty of Education, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China. His research interests include second language writing and classroom feedback and assessment in higher education. His publications have appeared in Educational Research Review, Assessing Writing, Journal of Second Language Writing, Language Teaching Research, Language Teaching, and TESOL Quarterly.