Eight-week emotion regulation training associated with better outcomes in university EFL speaking classes

An eight-week emotion regulation training program was associated with lower speaking anxiety, greater academic engagement and higher oral performance in a quasi-experimental study of Chinese undergraduate English as a foreign language learners. The study used an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, combining baseline-adjusted quantitative comparisons with interviews of students selected to represent strong, moderate and limited improvement profiles. Its findings support the possibility that explicit emotion regulation training may help learners manage the emotional demands of speaking, although the design cannot establish a definitive causal effect.

The quantitative phase included 80 undergraduate EFL learners from four intact General English classes. Two classes, with 37 students, continued to receive regular speaking instruction, while two classes, with 43 students, received emotion regulation training integrated into regular speaking instruction. The program was based on Gross’s process model, which includes trainable strategies such as attentional deployment and cognitive reappraisal, and Control–Value Theory, which was used to explain how regulation might help learners experience greater control over valued speaking tasks. A pretest–posttest non-equivalent control-group design was used, with student-level MANCOVA and follow-up ANCOVAs adjusting posttest outcomes for corresponding pretest scores.

All three baseline-adjusted comparisons favored the experimental condition. The multivariate effect was Wilks’ Λ = 0.68, F(3, 73) = 11.51, p < .001, partial η² = 0.32, 95% CI [0.14, 0.46]. Follow-up analyses showed lower speaking anxiety in the training condition, F(1, 75) = 15.82, p < .001, partial η² = 0.17, 95% CI [0.05, 0.33]; higher academic engagement, F(1, 75) = 8.97, p = .004, partial η² = 0.11, 95% CI [0.01, 0.25]; and higher oral performance, F(1, 75) = 13.24, p = .001, partial η² = 0.15, 95% CI [0.03, 0.30]. The qualitative phase involved 12 interviewed students whose accounts were analyzed with reflexive thematic analysis. Six themes emerged, indicating that learners did not respond uniformly: some transferred strategies flexibly, while others continued to struggle during graded, spontaneous or highly evaluative speaking.

Important limitations constrain the interpretation. Treatment was assigned at the class level, and only four classes were available, so the analyses are baseline-adjusted student-level comparisons rather than definitive cluster-adjusted causal estimates. Differences between classes or instructors may therefore account for some of the observed advantages. The interviews explain participants’ experiences but do not establish causal mechanisms. Taken together, the results are consistent with the possibility that explicit emotion regulation training can support emotional management, engagement and oral performance in university EFL speaking classes, but they do not show that the training alone caused the differences between groups.

Subject of Research: Effects of an eight-week emotion regulation training program on anxiety, engagement and oral performance among Chinese undergraduate EFL learners

Article Title: Effects of emotion regulation training on EFL learners’ speaking anxiety, academic engagement, and oral performance: An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design

Article References: Yan, Y. (2026). Effects of emotion regulation training on EFL learners’ speaking anxiety, academic engagement, and oral performance: An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05588-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05588-x

Keywords: emotion regulation training, EFL learners, speaking anxiety, academic engagement, oral performance, mixed-methods study, quasi-experiment, Chinese university students, Effects, emotion, regulation, training