Can emotion regulation pave the way to academic buoyancy? Evidence from Chinese university students in EMI programs

Learning through English-medium instruction (EMI) with daily academic challenges and setbacks is an emotion-intensive experience, making it essential to support learners in developing buoyancy through adaptive and effective emotion regulation strategies. This qualitative study investigates the emotion regulation strategies employed by EMI learners and how these strategies contribute to academic buoyancy. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and weekly reflective journals from 13 university students in China. Based on a combination of inductive and deductive analysis, the study reveals that students utilized a diverse array of emotion regulation strategies covering the four categories in Pekrun's (2006) taxonomy. Moreover, the findings indicate that different strategic emotion regulation behaviors led to varying levels of academic buoyancy, from high buoyancy, characterized by study enhancement, through moderate buoyancy, exemplified by study persistence, to low buoyancy, which manifested as resistance and dropout. In light of these findings, EMI programs should incorporate training designed to help students better understand and regulate their emotions. Most importantly, such programs should focus on leveraging effective emotion regulation strategies to enhance academic buoyancy, thereby promoting overall student success.