<p>Educational change has become an inherent part of a teacher’s professional life, and yet research on how teachers’ emotional and cognitive experiences influence their pedagogical decisions and agency remains limited. Drawing on Vygotsky’s concept of <i>perezhivanie</i>, a socio-cultural theory construct that describes a unity between emotion and cognition, this study examines how Vietnamese teachers experience, interpret, and enact the new English language curriculum within their unique local contexts. Data were collected through fifteen semi-structured teacher interviews and twenty-four classroom observations in seven public secondary school across socio-economic regions. The findings reveal that teachers exhibited a mix of positive and negative emotions towards the curriculum reform, with stronger inclination towards negative emotions. These emotional responses, combined with fragmented understandings of the prescribed pedagogy, the Communicative Language Teaching approach (CLT), resulted in superficial compliance with the reform policy and only minimal changes in classroom practices. This study highlights the complex interplay between teachers’ personal <i>perezhivanie</i> and agentic enactment of reform, underscoring the need to equip teachers with the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate emotional challenges and drive meaningful change. The study calls for a more cohesive and well-structured professional development program to enhance teacher capacity to support effective and sustained reform implementation.</p>