POSITIVE CRITICAL INCIDENTS EXPERIENCED BY NOVICE LANGUAGE TEACHERS IN THE LIGHT OF REBECCA OXFORD’S EMPATHICS MODEL

All language teachers go through tensions that can originate from what happens in their language classrooms. This article focuses on novice language teachers (both preservice and newly- employed) and critical incidents from their language classrooms, but in contrast to most studies conducted so far, our attention is placed on positive critical episodes – classroom events that are grounded in reality and contain a positive element for teachers. Our participants (n=30) provided us with narrative accounts containing 79 positive critical incidents in total. After reading them several times and negotiating potential categories, the positive episodes were grouped into those related to teaching skills and subsystems, handling classroom discipline, preparing for external exams and teaching cultural issues. That was followed by the comparison of ‘positivity’ described in the teachers’ accounts with Rebecca Oxford’s (2016) constituents making up her EMPATHICS model, which stands for a positive psychology framework in SLA. Thanks to this, we were able to fi nd out which elements of Oxford’s model appeared in the participants’ narrative accounts, which were ignored, and what new aspects were revealed. In addition, the analysis provides other insights involving the study and off ers a number of research problems related to critical events, positive psychology and language teachers that might be of interest for scholars.