Building on the notion of cognitive stimulus appraisals from emotion theory, this study attempted to identify trainees’ appraisals of tasks along the dimensions of pleasantness, goal congruence, and coping potential in Turkish pre-service teacher education. The aim was to identify possible task appraisal styles of learning tasks in methodology input enriched with techniques, strategies and theories taken from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). Using method and time triangulation, the data in this case study of longitudinal design were collected by means of 423 trainee questionnaires and 6 teacher interviews over a period of three years. The findings reveal the three major criteria of usefulness, applicability and enjoyment indicative of positive appraisal styles and the criteria of applicability and competence for negative appraisals. A scale for cognitive appraisals of tasks incorporating these three criteria is proposed.

Keywords: pre-service teacher education, emotion, cognitive appraisals of tasks, task appraisal styles