November 2025 – Volume 29, Number 3
https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.29115r2
Language Teacher Emotion, Identity Learning and Curriculum Reform |
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| Author: | Shanshan Yang (2024) |  |
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| Publisher: | Springer Singapore | ||
| Pages | e-ISBN | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
| pp. ix + 146 | 978-981-99-9744-2 | 119.99 €. (paper) | |
The eighth curriculum reform in China, beginning in 2001, emphasized the critical role of teachers, teacher training, and teachers’ independent development of the curriculum (Luo, 2023). Even as the ninth round of curriculum reform shifted the emphasis to cultivating learners, enhancing teachers’ skills and encouraging their participation has remained a top priority in the country. Curriculum reform is a complex process requiring policy-practice alignment, technology integration, and the need for continual adaptation to societal demands. However, curriculum change is more than just a procedural endeavor. Shifting policy requirements and features of school organization profoundly shape teachers’ internal and personal experiences, including their emotions as well as their beliefs, values, and biography (Lee & Yin, 2011). Therefore, curriculum reform plays a key role in constructing and developing teachers’ professional identity (Luo, 2023).
Meanwhile, longitudinal research on EFL teacher learning within the context of curriculum reform, and its reciprocal influence on teacher emotions and identities, particularly over time, is not well-explored. Shanshan Yang addresses these gaps in her book, Language Teacher Emotion, Identity Learning, and Curriculum Reform, which builds upon her doctoral dissertation. Across its eight chapters, this book offers an integrative, longitudinal, and emotion-centered understanding of teacher identity formation during Chinese curriculum reform.
The first four chapters of the book establish the context for this project. Chapter 1 highlights the relationship between teacher emotions and identity learning during curriculum reform to achieve long-lasting educational change. Chapter 2 expands on the concept of identity learning and introduces the DSMRI (Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity) framework to systematically analyze the reciprocal relationship between teacher identity and educational change. Chapter 3 explores teacher emotion in more depth as a critical and often overlooked factor in curriculum reform, and argues that recognizing these emotions is essential to understanding how teachers develop their professional identities. Following this, Chapter 4 reviews challenges and opportunities presented by college English curriculum reform in China, offering a perspective for comparative analysis and outlining some cultural and institutional factors influencing teacher emotions and identity.
The heart of the book, chapters 5 and 6, present the results of this empirical study, describing how Chinese EFL teachers experience and navigate curriculum reform through the lenses of emotion and identity respectively. In Chapter 5, Yang categorizes teachers’ emotional responses to curriculum reform by proposing four identity profiles, including calm bystander, stressed follower, enterprising forerunner, and skeptical innovator, and outlining ‘emotional geographies’ as the feeling rules that guide teachers’ emotional expression in professional contexts. Building on this, Chapter 6 offers a detailed typology of teacher emotions at the level of selves, others, and society, illustrating how teachers’ identities may change (or not) during curriculum reform. The chapter also analyzes how these identity trajectories are influenced by intergroup, interpersonal, and intrapersonal factors. Together, these two chapters offer a deep understanding of how curriculum reform affects teachers’ professional identity development, a process that is both dynamic and emotionally complex. The empirical focus on identity makes these chapters crucial reading for anyone interested in teacher development and educational reform.
Chapter 7 offers a synthesis of the previous chapters, looking into the potential of emotions as “identity learning tools” and outlining an interactive model demonstrating the dynamic relationship between these constructs. In the final chapter, the author summarizes the book’s main results, consolidates the book’s key themes, offers practical recommendations to policymakers and educators, and provides a roadmap for future research within and across these areas.
Language Teacher Emotion, Identity Learning, and Curriculum Reform makes a uniquely valuable contribution to the language education field by shifting perspectives, increasing comprehension, and promoting more emotionally aware practices for administrators and language teachers. One of the significant strengths is its use of a longitudinal study design that shows how emotion and professional identity influence one another and change over time, offering a depth of understanding that cross-sectional studies may not provide. Another notable strength of this book is its culturally situated analysis. While there are many studies of teacher emotion during educational change in the West, there has been a dearth of comparable studies in East Asia, especially in China (Lee & Yin, 2011). Yang addresses this gap by surfacing the unique emotional challenges and resources within the Chinese educational context, enriching the global discussion on teacher emotion and identity. Furthermore, the book successfully gives voice to actual teachers, based on their lived experiences, which adds authenticity and depth to the research results. Importantly, the author encourages readers to understand that teacher emotions are more than an outcome or consequence of curriculum changes. They also play an active role in shaping teachers’ professional identity and driving the success of curriculum reform itself. Successful educational change therefore requires a comprehensive approach that considers teacher emotions. This perspective both addresses a significant gap in the academic literature and also has direct relevance for policymakers, administrators, and teacher educators. For instance, incorporating teacher emotion and identity into policy discussions or professional development workshops can help foster more emotionally aware and supportive environments during curriculum reform.
While the book builds on a strong theoretical foundation, it has several limitations. The use of specialized concepts from different fields, such as ’emotional geographies’ in Chapter 5 and ‘identity learning typologies’ in Chapter 6, might be difficult for some readers to understand, as the primary audience are likely to be academics in foreign language education. To improve accessibility, the book would benefit from reader-friendly features such as text boxes with definitions and bold or italic formatting for key terms. Furthermore, the conclusion in Chapter 8 would be more impactful if it included a discussion of the study’s limitations, unexpected findings, and actionable recommendations for practitioners and policymakers, rather than just summarizing the results. One further consideration is the absence of clear, practicable strategies to translate the book’s insights into actionable guidance for individual practitioners. Addressing these areas would increase the book’s overall relevance and impact.
To sum up, the book highlights the importance of teacher emotion and identity learning as a key driver in the efficacy of curriculum changes and the need for teacher professional development efforts to consider these aspects. This work advances applied linguistics and language-teacher education by providing deep theoretical insights into teacher emotion, identity, and curriculum reform. Although practitioners may find its implications more reflective than directly actionable, academic researchers, graduate students, and policymakers interested in the complexities of educational change in a global context will all find much here of value.
Acknowledgement
The writing and publication of this review were supported by Lembaga Pengelola Dana Pendidikan (LPDP) Indonesia.
About the Reviewer
Iin Inawati is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in English Language Education at Yogyakarta State University, Indonesia. Her research interests include teachers’ well-being, teaching EFL, and SLA. ORCID ID. 0009-0002-1048-948X <iininawati.2024@student.uny.ac.id>
Dyah Setyowati Ciptaningrum is an Associate Professor at the English Education Department, Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta. Her research interests include teacher professional development, ICT in education, and English learning and teaching methodology. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2715-1170 <dyah_ciptaningrum@uny.ac.id>
To Cite this Review
Inawati, I., & Ciptaningrum, D. S. (2025). [Review of the book Language Teacher Emotion, Identity Learning and Curriculum Reform by Shanshan Yang] Teaching English as a Second Language Electronic Journal (TESL-EJ), 29 (3). https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.29115r2
References
Lee, J. C. K., & Yin, H. B. (2011). Teachers’ emotions and professional identity in curriculum reform: A Chinese perspective. Journal of Educational Change, 12(1), 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-010-9149-3
Luo, S. (2023). The current landscape and future direction of curriculum reform in China. Future in Educational Research, 1(1), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1002/fer3.8
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