Volume 62, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Second Language Teacher Emotion Labor; Guest Editors: Peter I. De Costa and Mostafa Nazari

Tensions between external sources of power and internal feeling rules in the workplace, i.e., emotion labour, can have a profound effect on professional dimensions. The purpose of this article is to report on a study that explored a secondary language teacher’s emotion labour and its influence on her professional (de)motivation and agency. Framed in narrative inquiry, this longitudinal study collected data through narrative interviews and drawings between February 2020 and March 2022. The participant was an EFL (English as foreign language) teacher who held teaching posts at three different state secondary schools and a private language centre in Argentina. During this period, the teacher grappled with emergency online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic and lengthy teacher strikes. Drawing on analysis of the short stories constructed from the narrative interviews, the tensions between external and internal feeling rules and their interplay with (de)motivation and agency are chronologically mapped out.

This case study explores an English learner (EL) teacher’s lived experiences of emotions concerning teacher collaboration in the US. The analysis of the EL teacher’s weekly journals and the recordings of her bi-weekly meetings with a teacher educator demonstrates that the teacher experienced a great amount of emotion labor under the feeling rule of “being supportive.” The major sources of her emotion labor include (1) content teachers’ lack of training concerning ELs; (2) the lack of systematic administrative support; and (3) her perceived teacher identity. The analysis also shows how her emotional reflexivity developed through reflection and collaborative dialogue with her mentor on her emotional experiences, empowering her to take a more active role in building a professional partnership with content teachers. The article ends with implications for language teacher education and further studies on language teacher emotions.

The present paper seeks to explore the contextual factors shaping the emotional labour experiences of secondary school teachers and explain the ways these educators manage their emotions. Data were generated through a series of 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with modern language (ML) teachers in the UK. The findings showed that teachers experienced primarily negative forms of emotional labour and these experiences were driven by five interrelated contextual factors: the lack of institutional support, heavy workload, low perceived status of MLs, students’ lack of motivation, and classroom misbehaviour. To manage their emotions, the study reveals that teachers used a wide range of coping mechanisms such as suppression, venting, social support, positive reframing, and the development of positive student–teacher relationships. In light of our results, we call for the emotional dimension of teaching to be better integrated into training programmes, an improvement in working conditions and better support mechanisms for teachers.

There have been many studies on teachers’ emotional labor and on how the ethics of caring affect teachers’ emotional labor. Yet, little research has examined teacher emotional labor under current neoliberal discourses in the education systems in Brazil. Using interviews and diaries, this study investigated the emotional labor of a Brazilian school teacher of English when teaching according to critical literacy studies. The findings indicated that her emotional labor was related to the political situation in Brazil, neoliberalism discourses and emotional rules, as well as clashes between teacher roles and her desire to teach critically. She felt torn between acting according to what she believed was good for her students and her critical literacy practice versus obeying the emotional rules for teachers’ and students’ roles at her school. As she did that, she experienced both domination and resistance. The study concludes with implications about neoliberalism as related to teacher emotional labor.

Teaching is by no means ‘an emotion-free zone’, and teachers are often emotionally challenged in front of their students. When teaching and learning takes place via a second language, the emotional landscape of the classroom becomes especially charged. Often there is a notable gap between expected emotions or ‘emotional rules’ in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms and genuine emotions which results in ‘emotional labour’ for ESL teachers. Especially, ‘English only’ language policies and monolingual ideologies can lead ESL teachers and students to experience a range of emotions around authentic language use in the form of translanguaging. While research on students’ attitudes toward translanguaging has mushroomed in recent years, fewer studies have concentrated on the emotions of teachers in relation to translanguaging in the ESL classroom. To bridge this research gap, this study investigates six university teachers’ emotions related to translanguaging via semi-structured interviews in ESL classroom settings across three Asian countries (Mongolia, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates). The study revealed complex and conflicting teacher emotions around translanguaging including pride, comfort (related to feelings of safety), shame (related to linguistic inferiority complexes), guilt, and frustration. Based on the findings, practical recommendations are provided on the need for greater awareness and open dialogue on emotions in ESL classrooms for improved teacher and student wellness.

In recent years, research on the emotional side of language teachers’ work has grown exponentially. One progressively-developing subset of this line of inquiry concerns how institutional discourses/expectations interact with teachers’ internal feelings, which bears on how they manage their emotions in response to such an interaction and is known as emotion labor. One type of institutional expectation of concern to the present study is the feedback that institutional supervisors provided for the teachers and could be a source of emotion labor. Motivated by this consideration, this study explored 12 Iranian EFL teachers’ emotion labor in relation to supervisor feedback on their classroom instruction. The context of the study was a language school governed by mostly top-down policies, especially those of classroom observation, realized mainly through providing post-class feedback by school supervisors, with little interaction between them and the teachers. Drawing on data from interviews and narrative frames, we report on how supervisor feedback on the teachers’ classroom instruction functioned as a source of emotional tension for the teachers and how they engaged in surface- and deep-acting management of their emotions to navigate the supervisory feedback. Based on the findings, we provide implications for teacher educators and school supervisors to reconsider their post-class supervisory feedback so that teachers experience less emotional tension.

This paper investigates the emotion labor experienced by transnational world language teachers (TWLTs), with a focus on Chinese language teacher candidates in a US dual immersion school residency program. Despite existing research on emotion labor in language teaching, the experiences of Chinese TWLTs have been underexplored. Through an analysis of mentorship and co-teaching, our findings reveal that much of the emotion labor among our participants stems from hierarchical mentorship structures influenced by Confucian ideologies. This hierarchical system constrains pedagogical autonomy, hindering TWLTs from fully embodying their transnational teacher identities. Consequently, the lack of power negotiation exacerbates the issue, leading to internalization of emotion labor and reduced teaching agency. We conclude by offering recommendations for future research on TWLTs’ emotions and advocating for a renewed emphasis on their mentoring experiences during teacher preparation programs.

While various aspects of language teachers’ emotional experiences have been gaining attention, including emotion labor and emotional capital, less attention has been placed on the emotional experiences of teacher educators supporting language teachers in emotionally challenging situations. Following calls to examine language teachers’ emotional experiences ecologically and as socially and institutionally shaped, we engaged in collaborative autoethnography to explore how language teacher and teacher educator emotion labor reflects answerability to multiple commitments in the face of external feeling rules. Our findings highlight how language teacher–teacher educator collaboration can mitigate as well as reproduce emotion labor. This study contributes to research on language teacher emotion labor by focusing on the role of the teacher educator in supporting language teacher emotional capital and highlighting the complexity underlying emotion labor and emotional capital as multi-directional. Furthermore, the study illustrates how collaborative autoethnography can generate reflexivity and emotional capital for language teacher educators.

While a number of studies have documented the significant role of emotions and the emotion labor produced in English language teaching, research exploring English instructors’ emotion labor in transnational higher education contexts such as international branch campuses (IBCs) and within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs is lacking. Arguably, these neoliberally-driven and educational neocolonialist endeavors can produce intense emotion labor for English instructors. This study employs a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) methodology to investigate what provoked emotion labor for expatriate instructors, who teach English courses to Qatari national students at an IBC in Qatar. Taking a poststructural approach to emotion labor as our theoretical framing, we collaboratively examined our emotion labor in audio-recorded weekly meetings and then engaged in further dialogues and writings about our emotion labor. We reflect on two themes that produced emotion labor as well as emotional capital for us: 1) navigating our purpose teaching English to engineering majors and 2) confronting our roles as English instructors within a context of educational neocolonialism. Our study adds to the knowledge base of English teachers’ emotion labor in transnational and STEM spaces, while also showcasing CAE as a transformative methodology to explore language teachers’ emotion labor.

This brief Commentary examines how the nine articles in the Special Issue on Second Language Teacher Emotion Labor build on sociologist Arlie Hochschild's conceptualization of emotional labor as well as more recent poststructuralist orientations to language teacher emotion labor by scholars in applied linguistics. To that end, it focuses on two common themes that run throughout these articles: the effects of feeling rules on language teachers and the role of power and its beneficiaries. It discusses how the articles in this Special Issue expand and develop our understanding of language teacher emotion labor through applying it to new contexts by drawing on additional, complementary theoretical perspectives, and through using a broader range of research methods. Recommendations for future research are offered in the conclusion.

This commentary presents a nuanced, dialectical, and empowering perspective on research pertaining to language teacher emotions, drawing upon empirical research papers featured in this special issue, as well as other relevant literature in the field of language teacher education. Recognizing the embodied, dynamic, and potentially contested nature of teacher emotional labor, the paper emphasizes the importance of presenting a nuanced portrayal, adopting a dialectical approach, and embracing an empowering mindset when investigating language teacher emotions. It also highlights important directions for future research, advocating for a conceptual shift toward examining teacher emotional labor as a distributed practice with a participatory and transformative orientation. Furthermore, the significance of both “looking inward” to delve into specific types of emotions and their interactions as well as “looking outward” to explore how emotions relate to other crucial dimensions of language teachers’ professional practices such as identity, mindfulness, and resilience, is emphasized.