1　Introduction

Against the backdrop of rapid advancement in global AI education policies, Chinese university English teachers face challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in teaching transformation. This study introduces the emotional experience perspective from sociocultural theory and employs Q methodology to compare differences in GAI use agency between novice and experienced teachers. Emotional experience, as a unity of cognition, emotion, and behavior, aligns highly with the three dimensions of GAI use agency, aiming to reveal teachers' three-dimensional interactive representations of agency and the drivers of synergy/conflict, thereby providing evidence for improving teacher professional development mechanisms and promoting the transformation from "GAI-empowered education" to educational ecology.

2　Literature Review

This section systematically reviews the research status and theoretical gaps in three core domains. Regarding GAI and L2 teacher development research, existing literature has explored from diverse theoretical perspectives including positive psychology, phenomenology, and communities of practice, focusing on three dimensions: impact on language skill teaching, auxiliary teaching practices, and teacher competency development. However, notable methodological and population biases exist: research methods are predominantly qualitative, with mixed-methods designs emerging yet failing to integrate cognitive and emotional inquiries into agency; research populations emphasize pre-service and novice teachers while neglecting experienced teachers. Most critically, deep representations of teacher GAI agency within the sociocultural theoretical framework remain insufficiently revealed, and the disconnect between quantitative and qualitative methods leads to inadequate analysis of three-dimensional synergistic mechanisms of agency. Regarding L2 agency research, although agency has been defined as action capacity under sociocultural mediation, existing studies mostly deconstruct it into independent dimensions of cognition, behavior, and emotion for separate investigation, lacking grasp of the holistic characteristics of multi-dimensional synergy. Emotional experience theory, as a core concept of sociocultural theory, provides an analytical framework for integrating the cognition-emotion-behavior unity; its dual connotations (process and content) and contradiction focus mechanism can reveal the developmental trajectory of teacher agency in GAI interaction. Based on this, the study proposes two core research questions: respectively exploring the agency representations of three-dimensional interaction and their contradiction foci among novice and experienced teachers from the emotional experience perspective.

3　Research Design

The study comprises 34 university English teachers from higher education institutions in the Lingnan region, including detailed background information on 17 novice teachers and 17 experienced teachers. The study employs Q methodology, combining qualitative and quantitative advantages to explore multiple perspectives, with high compatibility between this method and the emotional experience theoretical framework. Data collection encompasses six steps: Q-concourse construction, Q-set selection, questionnaire design and distribution, P-set selection, and post-hoc interviews, yielding 46 valid questionnaires and 316 minutes of auxiliary interviews. Data analysis utilizes KADE 1.2.0 software, employing Brown Centroid factor extraction and varimax rotation, with eigenvalue ≥1.0 as threshold, ensuring cumulative explained variance reaches 50%-60%.

4　Research Results and Discussion

First, factor analysis was conducted on Q-sort data for novice and experienced teachers respectively, extracting 4 factors each, with cumulative explained variances of 56% and 51% respectively, and all eigenvalues exceeding 1.0, indicating reliable questionnaire validity. Subsequently, agency representations of GAI use for both teacher groups were extracted through the three-dimensional interaction framework: novice teachers include Contradictory Explorers, Critical Pragmatists, Conservative Traditionalists, and Confident Innovators; experienced teachers include Contradictory Weighers, Efficiency-driven Users, Innovative Explorers, and Function-focused Users. Each representation presents unique characteristics across cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions; for instance, Contradictory Explorers exhibit cognitive conflict between recognizing tool efficiency and worrying about student dependency, with limited exploration in behavior; Efficiency-driven Users follow logic dominated by instrumental rationality, with high-frequency use and proactive learning. Finally, emotional experience contradiction foci across different groups were deeply explored: novice teachers' contradictions center on dual identity conflict between technology adopters and educational gatekeepers, tension between utilizing technological efficacy and safeguarding educational values, and structural confrontation between traditional experience and technological transformation; experienced teachers focus more on conflict between technological convenience and student dependency risks, cognitive dilemmas from unreconstructed role positioning, disconnection between technological beliefs and implementation capabilities, and fundamental conflict between fragmented technology acceptance and functional limitations. Both teacher groups face tension between technological innovation and traditional education, but novice teachers more fundamentally manifest identity and value contradictions, while experienced teachers highlight systematic application challenges.

5　Discussion

This section explores the multi-dimensional interactive mechanism of university English teachers' agency in using GAI from the emotional experience perspective. Technical barriers, ethical controversies, and role reconstruction pressures constitute contradiction foci, activating agency development by triggering cognitive confusion, emotional turbulence, and behavioral dysregulation. Agency presents three-dimensional interaction across cognition, emotion, and behavior: the cognitive dimension involves technical interpretation and identity transformation; the emotional dimension manifests as coexistence of efficacy and crisis feelings; the behavioral dimension embodies the paradox of tool adoption and limitation. Emotional experience serves as an integrative hub, transforming cognitive evaluation into emotional motivation and driving behavioral choices. Based on this, three developmental implications are proposed: focusing on contradiction diagnosis bottlenecks, constructing three-dimensional dynamic pathways, and promoting ecological transformation. The chapter further constructs the "Dynamic Development Model of Teacher Agency 'Cognition-Emotion-Behavior' Interaction Driven by Contradiction Foci," with core logic that contradiction foci trigger three-dimensional integrative interaction, and agency development represents a balance between contradiction resolution capacity and practical creativity. This model possesses triple functions of diagnosis, intervention, and evaluation, providing a systematic analytical framework for teachers' technology integration agency.

6　Conclusion

Through the integrated "Cognition-Emotion-Behavior" framework, this study comparatively analyzed novice and experienced teachers' subjective experiences of GAI use, revealing contradiction foci, three-dimensional interactive mechanisms, and dynamic generative characteristics of teacher agency from the emotional experience perspective, and demonstrating the effectiveness of emotional experience as dimensions of diagnosis, intervention, and evaluation, while noting limitations of insufficient sample size and lack of longitudinal tracking and future research directions.