Academic emotions in giving genre-based peer feedback: an emotional intelligence perspective

Abstract Researchers have become interested in the emotion in feedback situations, yet little research has examined peer feedback-giving emotions. Giving feedback is emotionally laden and it is challenging and demanding for feedback givers to manage their emotions. Uncovering how feedback givers regulate their emotions as well as determining what influences them could extend the current understanding of the peer feedback-giving process. Informed by emotional intelligence (EI) (Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional intelligence . London: Bloomsbury Publishing.), a notion describing an individual’s ability to monitor and manage one’s own and others’ emotions, this case study investigated how two Chinese Ph.D. English as a foreign language students utilized EI to regulate their feedback-giving process on research proposal writing. Data was collected from research proposal drafts and revisions, peer feedback, self-reported emotions, interviews, and stimulated recalls. The textual and qualitative data analysis revealed that individual differences existed regarding feedback focus, strategies, and emotions. The findings suggested that the feedback givers adopted different EI patterns to regulate their feedback giving process under the influence of five factors: goals and purposes, prior feedback experience, time constraints, the intimacy of relations, and the feedback givers’ perceived significance of the sections in a research proposal. Practical implications for teachers, supervisors, and students were discussed.