Wahyu Indah Mala Rohmana, Yohanis Nurak Siwa, Utami Widiati, Yazid Basthomi, Basori, Maria Goreti Djehatu
The study of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' emotional engagement at high schools in rural areas has obtained little attention in the current literature. Addressing this gaps, the present study investigated both teachers' and students' voices on the factors promoting emotional engagement and the strategies used by teachers to foster it in a senior high school in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. A qualitative case study design was adopted, involving semi-structured interviews with four English teachers and twenty students. The data were analyzed using six phased thematic analysis approach. The findings reveal that students' emotional engagement is shaped by a dynamic interplay of teacher-related, student-related, and contextual factors. From teachers' perspectives, key influencing factors include teachers' emotional competence, teacher-student rapport, and the availability of school facilities. Meanwhile, students perceived their personal motivation, peer and parental support as the factors fostering their emotional involvement in learning. Furthermore, teachers were found to implement a range of interactive and motivational learning strategies, such as incorporating games, song and visual materials, to promote the students' emotional engagement. These strategies function as adaptive responses to contextual challenges, particularly in resource-limited rural setting, where inadequate facilities and learning materials necessitate greater reliance on teacher creativity and relational support. The study contributes to the understanding of emotional engagement particularly in rural EFL classrooms where pedagogical, relational, and structural factors interact to shape students' emotional experience. The findings offer implications for EFL teachers, students, school leaders and policymakers to establish emotionally supportive and contextually responsive learning environments. Copyright (c) 2026 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Department of English Language Education, Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia; Department of English Education, Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim, Malang, Indonesia; Department of English Language Teaching, Universitas Katolik Widya Mandira, Indonesia; Department of Educational Technology, Purdue University, United States
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