The impact of positive psychology on EFL trainee teachers’ views on their well-being in the pandemic

Abstract

The pandemic that took us all by surprise and occurred across the world with different degrees of intensity resulted in the situation where there is an urgent need to develop coping strategies that would minimize the damage of lockdown and being left at the mercy of technology in our professional lives. This article demonstrates how my students, future teachers of English at the BA level, reacted to the pandemic and how the course they were participating in impacted their well-being. The course in question is positive psychology in TEFL, a part of TEFL methodology module. It is introduced in the programme of studies as an innovative and individualized approach to teaching a foreign language. But in fact, it offers much more as positive psychology is a whole new attitude to one’s life: “One of the main pillars of positive psychology is the role our emotions (affectivity) play in various con-texts of life; thus this is also true of the language classroom” (Gabryś-Barker 2021: 187). Positive psychology also emphasizes the role of our strengths and weaknesses and the impact of the so-called enabling institutions (such as schools, universities) (Seligman 2002, MacIntyre et al. 2016). The students’ reflections are gathered on the basis of narrative inquiry and as such they are analyzed according to the frame-work of qualitative content analysis.