Agency and Emotion in Narrative Accounts of Emergent Conflict in an L2 Classroom

Abstract

Although recent years have witnessed increasing engagement with agency and emotion in applied linguistics together with claims that they are related constructs, precisely how they are related has not been the subject of research attention. Drawing on stance as an analytical tool, this article examines the interrelationships between emotion and agency from a dialogical perspective in multiple accounts of an incident of emergent conflict in an L2 class for immigrants and refugees. Accounts of the conflict are given by a teacher in three settings: in an initial written account, then revisited in an individual interview, and subsequently as part of a group discussion with teachers. The analysis illustrates the interrelationships between affective stance attribution and agency, agency as control over projected stance, emotion and dilemmas of answerability, commitment to stance as an agentive resource, and through emotion and constrained agency as intersubjective stance. The article addresses wider questions concerning how and why emotions get talked about as teachers author themselves and assign meaning as crucial dimensions of their agency.