In an educational landscape increasingly dominated by utilitarian-technocratic values and affective austerity, the psychosocial dimension of learner identity is often sidelined. This orientation has marginalised the humanities and social sciences, displacing affect, ethics, and narrative from the centre of human inquiry, thereby prioritising productivity and quantification over reflection and emotional growth, reducing learners to data points rather than meaning-makers. This study seeks to reassert the value of psychosocial and affective meaning-making in education by drawing on Narrative Identity Theory, which views writing as a form of self-narration reflecting the writer's emotional and psychological state. Thirty-six student-teachers enrolled in an undergraduate education programme each produced a narrative text of approximately 1,200 words in a genre of their choice. Corpus linguistic methods were employed (using RStudio packages) to map sentiment trajectories against different genres, using these lexical patterns as proxies for the construction of narrative identity. Results indicate a statistically significant, albeit small (v = .06), association between genre choice and affective sentiment, suggesting that narrative identity is (re)constructed as a continuous process rather than a fixed outcome. The findings, interpreted via Kramsch’s and Uryu’s “third space” theory and Bakhtin’s operationalisation of ventriloquism, show that student-teachers’ narratives often challenge normative identity archetypes and pedagogical expectations. The study demonstrates the potential of genre-sentiment analysis as a reflective and insight-generating tool for educators seeking to understand students’ affective states and identity negotiation. Future research may extend this work to multimodal storytelling and the development of emotional resilience in teacher education contexts.

Keywords: Genre Analysis; Sentiment Analysis; Learner Corpus; Narrative Identity; NRC Sentiment Lexicon

DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2026-3201-18

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