Volume 41, Issue 4 - Emotions in second language teaching: Theory, research and teacher education. Special Issue Co-Editors: Peter I. De Costa, Hima Rawal & Wendy Li

Teacher well-being has been shown to play a central role in the quality of teaching and student achievement (Day & Gu, 2009; Klusmann, Kunter, Trautwein, Lüdtke, & Baumert, 2008). However, the teaching profession is currently in crisis as it faces record rates of burnout and attrition (Borman & Dowling, 2008; Hong, 2010; Lovewell, 2012), including stressors specific to the changing nature of foreign language teaching (Hiver & Dörnyei, 2015; Wieczorek, 2016) and to higher education (Kinman & Wray, 2013). This study seeks to understand how language teachers perceive of and experience their emotional well-being and what strategies they employ to manage it. Through a series of 12 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with ESL/EFL tertiary-level teachers in the United States, Japan and Austria, we explore a range of contexts examining how participants perceive of factors that add to or detract from their emotional well-being, the challenges and joys these teachers face in their professional and personal lives, and the most salient emotional regulation strategies that they employ to manage their emotions.

Few jobs come without irritations, and foreign language instruction comes with its own particular set of frustrations which, when accumulated, can lead to stress and eventual burnout for teachers. One mechanism for reducing such frustrations is that of emotion regulation, the cognitive and behavioral strategies individuals employ to manage the emotions they experience or display. To date, no known studies have reported specifically on the in-class frustration experienced by language teachers, or on how teachers regulate their feelings of frustration. Herein, the authors discuss the experiences of seven EFL teachers at a university in Japan obtained through a series of semistructured interviews, classroom observations and corresponding stimulated-recall sessions. The authors discuss four salient thematic frustrations: student apathy, classroom silence, misbehavior in the context of relational strain, and working conditions. The results reveal that participants applied contextually-dependent emotion regulation behaviors, the success of which was often contingent on the participants’ levels of confidence and control over the stressors. Thus, participants showed more success in managing pervasive low-level stressors such as apathy and silence, and more support would be welcome to aid them to manage more debilitating stressors such as student misbehavior. The authors offer suggestions for teachers, trainers and institutions on reducing frustration.

A growing number of recent studies in applied linguistics focus on teacher emotions in response to several major shifts within the field, expanding the scope of analyses to include the social and affective dimensions of second language education. This paper aims to expand the discussion on the emotions of non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs) by examining their anxiety from the perspective of sociopolitical and socioeconomic theories. By introducing three theories on emotions developed by Raymond Williams (1977), Pierre Bourdieu (1986), and Sara Ahmed (2015), I demonstrate how their insights on the social construction and circulation of emotions can be applied to NNESTs’ emotional struggles in relation to structural inequalities. Then, I discuss theoretical and practical implications of this perspective on language teaching and teacher education, calling for criticality in the area of teacher emotions.

This paper reports an investigation into the relationships between global trait emotional intelligence (Trait EI), as well as the four factors that constitute it (well-being, emotionality, self-control, and sociability), and quantitative data from 513 experienced ESL/EFL teachers from around the world about their love of English, their attitudes towards their students and institution, their self-reported classroom practices, their enjoyment, unpredictability and creativity. The results showed significant positive correlations. The analyses revealed that global Trait EI, well-being and sociability were significantly positively correlated with most dependent variables while emotionality and self-control were significantly correlated with a number of dependent variables. Global Trait EI and emotionality were significantly positively linked to the English proficiency of English foreign language users but not to that of the English L1 users. The pedagogical implication is that having a sufficient level of Trait EI helps teachers deal effectively with their own and their students’ emotions.

The ethical project of education hinges on the ideal of caring relations between teachers and students, an ideal that entails deep emotional commitments on the part of teachers. Drawing on interview data from a larger study of teachers’ lived experiences in Singapore’s secondary schools, this paper examines the cultural politics of caring as an emotional practice in teaching. The ethic of care serves to construct normative accounts of good teaching based on “feeling rules,” and becomes a disciplinary technology for evaluating the professional, social and emotional competencies of teachers. I suggest that this project in turn entails an ideological effort to mobilize teachers’ emotional attachment to this ethical ideal. The ethic of care shapes the subjectivities, beliefs, and practices of English teachers, particularly as they circulate through the neoliberal imperatives of educational accountability regimes.

In this paper, we wish to respond to the call for expansion on our knowledge about teacher beliefs (Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015) and discuss findings of studies on teacher emotions conducted in Brazil with both in-service and pre-service teachers of English. More specifically, we focus 1) on the kinds of emotions these teachers have reported feeling, and 2) on the relationship between beliefs and emotions. The results have shown: 1) the diversity of emotions teachers experience in their teacher education; and 2) how these emotions interact in dynamic and complex ways with their beliefs about teaching English in Brazil. The findings suggest that looking into the interrelationships between emotions and beliefs can shed light onto our understanding of the teachers’ thinking and practices in their contexts. Implications and questions for further research will be discussed in light of the studies reviewed.

The exploration of links between faith and second language pedagogy has been underexplored, and the emotional experiences of English language teachers of religious faith are even less studied in applied linguistics circles. This qualitative case study is an effort to address this gap in the research by investigating the faith-based emotional experiences of May, a veteran English lecturer practicing Buddhism in China, by drawing on multiple data sources that include interviews, classroom observations, WeChat conversations, student evaluations, and researcher journals. Our findings revealed that (1) May’s emotional experiences were strongly driven by and deeply derived from her Buddhist faith and other aspects of identity in the classroom; (2) her faith-based emotional experiences were dynamic and fluid; (3) her faith-based identity occupied a central position alongside her professional identities and had a transformative influence on both her emotional experiences and her identity development; and (4) the interactions among her emotional experiences, multiple identities, and pedagogical praxis were complex and reciprocal. The research implications, limitations and future directions are also discussed.

In this study, we investigated how an English-as-medium-of-instruction mathematics teacher in China and an English teacher in Nepal fell into and out of love with the teaching profession. A theoretical framework of love, which drew from the theorization of love in Barcelos and Coelho (2016) and Lanas and Zembylas (2015), was adopted to provide guidance for our understanding of the construct and our interpretation of the data. In this framework, love is conceptualized as being communicated through teachers’ attending to individual students, and building a mutually supportive learning environment. In addition, love is also seen as socially and historically constructed. Our data include interviews, teaching materials, and other curricular artifacts. Our findings revealed that teachers’ love toward the profession sustains their investment in teaching, and their love of their students helps them accept the students on the latter’s own terms. In addition, a loving relationship between teachers and students was also instantiated in the mutual understanding and support between both parties during classroom interactions. Finally, we also demonstrate how our two focal teachers’ love of the profession was either enhanced or worn out due to work-related sociopolitical factors.