The Emotional Rollercoaster of Language Teaching

Christina Gkonou, Jean-Marc Dewaele, Jim King

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788928359
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book focuses on the emotional complexity of language teaching and how the diverse emotions that teachers experience while teaching are shaped and function. The book is based on the premise that teaching is not just about the transmission of academic knowledge but also about inspiring students, building rapport with them, creating relationships based on empathy and trust, being patient and most importantly controlling one's own emotions and being able to influence students' emotions in a positive way. The book covers a range of emotion-related topics on both positive and negative emotions which are relevant to language teaching including emotional labour, burnout, emotion regulation, resilience, emotional intelligence and wellbeing among others. These topics are studied within a wide range of contexts such as teacher education programmes, tertiary education, CLIL and action research settings, and primary and secondary schools across different countries. The book will appeal to any student, researcher, teacher or policymaker who is interested in research on the psychological aspects of foreign language teaching.

1 Introduction to the Emotional Rollercoaster of Language Teaching

Christina Gkonou, Jean-Marc Dewaele and Jim King

Language Teacher Emotions and the Focus of This Anthology

Emotions are at the centre of all human behaviour. Sometimes we may feel excited, motivated, energetic and happy, but at times we may also experience frustration, anxiety, fear or sadness. Emotions are not static but can instead fluctuate over time and across settings; and talking about the latter, certain settings are likely to generate more intense emotions than others. Research has shown, for instance, that language classrooms are inherently stressful environments for some people (Horwitz, 2017) but also places where students can feel enjoyment (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2016). The now large body of research into language learner emotions and in particular language anxiety has highlighted the detrimental effects of high anxiety levels on academic performance and success as well as future attempts to learn foreign languages (Dewaele & Thirtle, 2009; Gkonou et al., 2017). Although second language researchers have long been interested in aspects surrounding language learner anxiety, research into language teacher emotions – and other aspects of language teacher psychology – has started gaining momentum only in the last decade (Mercer & Kostoulas, 2018). This was largely inspired by work in general education, which focused on an exploration of specific emotions among teachers, such as satisfaction or anger, the relationship between student and teacher emotions, and emotions generated in moments of educational reform and change (see e.g. Hargreaves, 2000; Schutz & Zembylas, 2010. These publications have demonstrated that teaching is an emotion-laden process, yet there is still much that we do not fully understand about how teacher emotions function in classrooms, how they influence the practice of teaching and how they shape teacher professional identities.

In this introductory chapter, and before we turn to the focus of this collection, it is important to clarify definitional issues surrounding the construct of ‘emotions’ and also briefly discuss the main approaches to theorising emotions. We start with emotions versus feelings and the fact that many people use these words interchangeably, to mean the same thing. Emotions and feelings should, however, be seen as two distinct but highly interrelated concepts. Emotions refer to physical manifestations or responses to an event, as opposed to feelings which depict mental associations and reactions to an emotion (Barrett, 2017). In this sense, emotions lead to feelings. The second aspect to which we would like to draw attention concerns how emotions have been previously theorised. Biological approaches to emotions have suggested that emotions are innate, produced in the brain and thus universally shared (see e.g. Ekman, 1993). Such an approach therefore implies that emotions are common among all people and that all people would experience the same emotion in the same way, without considering context-related specificities and individual cultures and histories of each person that are likely to determine how an emotion is experienced. Next, the cognitive approach to emotions assumes that emotions are appraisals and arise when individuals evaluate a situation or an event and its impact on them (Lazarus, 1991; Scherer, 2005). This cognitive approach has largely informed key frameworks on emotion regulation such as Gross’s process model of emotion regulation, which proposed that the attention attached to a situation is appraised, thus leading to cognitive change and a subsequent response (Gross, 2014). The third approach is the theory of constructed emotion (Barrett, 2017). In this view emotions are seen as psychological constructions rather than biological entities. Emotions do not have dedicated neural regions or networks in the brain. They also do not have unique fingerprints since individuals can express them in unique ways depending on the situation and on their own previous experiences, which are shaped by the culture in which they grew up. Societies generate emotion category labels and children acquire them through socialisation and observation of the language used around them to identify emotion categories in themselves and in others. The fourth approach, the poststructuralist/discursive approach to emotions, fits seamlessly within the former. It takes into account an individual’s history, social identities, cultural contexts and power in understanding and interpreting emotions (see e.g. Benesch, 2017; Zembylas, 2005) and has inspired research into teacher emotions within mainstream education and second language acquisition (SLA).

The present anthology aims at extending our understandings and conceptualisations of language teacher emotions across a range of second language contexts. In these contexts, ‘negative’ emotions often emerge as a result of unexpected changes, language-related concerns, less supportive leadership, excessive workload, others’ and one’s own expectations, and dysfunctional interpersonal relationships among members involved in the educational process. Such conditions are most likely to exacerbate stress, uncertainty and dissatisfaction among teachers, thus occasionally leading to burnout and posing a threat to their professional longevity. Nevertheless, the picture is not totally gloomy and language teachers can also experience emotional rewards and associated ‘positive’ emotions. These are often felt after one has employed emotional self-regulation strategies or consciously undertaken emotional labour, a notion that was originally proposed by Hochschild (1979) in her research with flight attendants. Hochschild explored how the ‘feeling rules’ of a workplace determine what emotions are appropriate and should be displayed by employees during their interactions with customers. In particular, the focus was on the emotional equanimity that flight attendants were expected to project during these interactions without necessarily expecting the customers to reciprocate. The situation in the classroom is similar as teachers manage and display their emotions in front of students in appropriate ways.

In this anthology, it is not our intention to show how language teachers should feel; nor do we aim to divide emotions into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ and contend that the former should be maximised and the latter minimised. Poststructuralist researchers within SLA have in fact suggested that instead of focusing on what emotions are, we should look at what emotions do (Ahmed, 2004; Benesch, 2017). Additionally, in avoiding the binary opposition between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions, terms like ‘pleasant’ and ‘painful’ have also been proposed as possible adjectives to describe the nature and function of emotions (see e.g. Oxford, 2017). Thus, for the present volume we intended to bring together insights into the complexity and dynamism of language teacher emotions, suggest possible methods for researching emotions and reflect on implications for classroom practice, with a view to investigating the broader experience of emotions as lived by language teachers.

Why an Anthology about Language Teacher Emotions?

A significant body of research into language teacher psychology has focused on issues surrounding language teacher cognition (see e.g. Borg, 2015) and motivation (see e.g. Dörnyei & Kubanyiova, 2014), with research into language teacher emotions remaining disproportionately less prevalent. Although it is worth acknowledging that emotions are interrelated with cognition and motivation, only one bespoke volume on language teacher emotions has been published to date. The edited volume by Martínez Agudo (2018) entitled Emotions in Second Language Teaching: Theory, Research and Teacher Education offers a holistic overview of language teacher emotions with a special focus on the teaching of English as a foreign language. Subsequently in early 2019, the Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics also devoted a special issue to the topic of second language teachers’ emotions, co-edited by De Costa, Rawal and Li. These publications are indicative of the increased importance attached to language teacher emotions and the recognition that they should form an integral part of academic discussions, teacher education programmes and language pedagogy as a whole.

We see the current collection of chapters as an attempt to provide impetus for further research into language teacher emotions and for a new agenda on what we still need to understand about teacher emotions in order to help teachers themselves as well as their learners. Through the diverse voices of researchers represented in this book, we hope to reach fellow researchers, language teachers, teacher educators, and undergraduate and postgraduate students, and entice them to conduct their own research into this fascinating area of language teacher psychology. We also hope that the post-reading tasks accompanying each chapter will incentivise readers of the book to critically reflect on the content of each chapter and will open up fresh and fruitful discussions on language teacher emotions.

The Organisation of this Anthology¹

Following this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 by Hofstadler, Talbot, Mercer and Lӓmmerer concentrates on the professional subjective well-being of secondary school teachers of CLIL in Austria. The authors draw on previous research into content and language integrated learning (CLIL; see Pappa et al., 2019), which has unravelled factors that contribute to and detract from teachers experiencing positive well-being, and use in-depth, semi-structured interviews with teachers to identify positive, negative and ambiguous aspects of teaching CLIL: what they have called the ‘thrills’ and ‘ills’ of CLIL. The teacher participants in their study were found to have positive attitudes towards CLIL and confidence in their CLIL teaching skills. They also felt that teaching CLIL contributed significantly to their own continuous professional development. However, they seemed concerned about their workload and issues of compensation, work–life balance and appreciation with regard to the amount of work they were confronted with. Factors such as CLIL teaching materials, their students and contextual support led to both positive and negative well-being. The authors conclude the chapter by highlighting the importance of teacher autonomy in CLIL contexts and calling for more research into how teacher well-being within CLIL settings could be addressed in more meaningful ways, both at a personal and contextual level.

In their 2016 interview-based study into the emotional labour performed by language teachers working in a rural high school in the southern United States, Acheson and her colleagues provided a thoroughly depressing account of poorly supported staff engaged in excessive emotional labour in response to apathetic students not invested in foreign language learning. Over time, such excessive emotional labour can lead to burnout (see Näring et al., 2006) and ultimately teacher attrition. Acheson and Nelson take this research forward, turning towards quantitative methods in Chapter 3 to investigate to what extent a sample of 83 public high school language teachers in the state of Georgia engage in emotional labour and how contextual factors mediate their emotional performances in the workplace. Findings from a modified version of Brotheridge and Lee’s (2003) Emotional Labour Scale (ELS) questionnaire seem to suggest that teachers in the study’s sample tended to engage in moderate to high levels of emotional labour in their daily professional lives. Interestingly, gender did not seem to play a role in whether the teachers pretended, hid or made an effort to generate particular emotions whilst teaching, with men being just as likely as women to perform emotional labour. The research presented here is food for thought for those interested in teacher well-being and has implications for the amount and type of support afforded to language teachers currently working in Georgia’s public school system.

In Chapter 4, Benesch builds upon her previous work considering emotions in English language education from a critical perspective (e.g. Benesch, 2012) by exploring the emotionally charged experiences of teachers who provide feedback on students’ written work. In contrast to biological or cognitive theories which locate emotions within the mind or body of the individual, Benesch argues that it is more productive for critically orientated researchers to view emotions as sociocultural constructs mediated by power relationships. Following Ahmed’s (2004) ideas about a cultural politics of emotion, she discusses the notion of ‘sticky objects’ as a tool for theorising about emotions, arguing that social norms of emotion become ‘sticky’ with affect through repetition. Drawing on data collected from interviews with English language instructors working within the author’s own faculty, the chapter illustrates, via instances of interviewees’ emotional discourse, the conflicts and dilemmas they experienced when responding to student writing. These conflicts and dilemmas appear to assemble around two main themes: emotion labour associated with a lack of time to provide feedback and uncertainty about the type of feedback to give students. In light of these findings, Benesch discusses the quandary of how to give meaningful feedback to students without spending unreasonable amounts of time on marking and highlights the ongoing debate about whether providing detailed written corrective feedback is in both the student’s and the instructor’s best interests.

Edwards and Burns use the metaphor of Pandora’s box in their chapter (Chapter 5) on the dynamic emotional experiences of five in-service novice and more experienced English language teachers engaged in action research (AR). They propose a sociocultural perspective on the study of language teacher emotions and identity and show how metaphor analysis could be extended to the study of emotions, acknowledging that to date it has been constrained to focused explorations of teacher identities only. Moving from a teacher role to a researcher role requires institutional support from the teacher education programme and the workplace. Insufficient support can cause negative emotional experiences while sufficient support, combined with voluntary participation, can strengthen teacher engagement, solidarity with fellow teacher researchers and a feeling of belonging in institutional, cross-institutional or even global communities of practice. The authors discuss the wide range of emotional experiences of their participants, by showing how participants felt overwhelmed and euphoric during AR, humble or energised at the end of AR and restricted or re-energised after AR. Edwards and Burns conclude that teacher engagement with action research comes with personal, professional and wider institutional benefits.

In the next chapter (Chapter 6), Kostoulas and Lӓmmerer explore the concepts of resilient adaptation, which helps towards facilitating the management of unpleasant emotional states and expanding the repertoire of emotion regulation strategies for teachers; and teacher resilience, referring to teachers’ ability to function effectively in their professional roles despite hurdles and adversities. The authors construct a tentative, complexity-informed model of teacher resilience by drawing on interview data from two pre-service teachers, who have just completed their first assignments on teaching, for the purposes of testing the descriptive utility of the model. The chapter illustrates the participants’ inner strengths, the role of external support and environmental determinants in the development of resilience, how resilience can exert both an adaptive and maladaptive influence on the teachers’ professional performance and in particular their adjustment to the demands of teaching, and how the so-called negative emotions of teaching, which are likely to be experienced in stressful environments, help practising teachers to grow professionally. The authors stress that adversity could be viewed as a trigger for psychological growth and continuous professional development, and are hopeful that the dynamism of teacher resilience will be taken forward in future projects.

Over the last decade there has been a blossoming of applied linguistics research into the notion of the L2 self, primarily focusing on how the concept relates to language learner motivation. In Chapter 7, Falout extends the construct by exploring how learners’ past selves relate to emotions and group dynamics within classrooms. Past selves involve thinking back to previous learning and teaching experiences, with the subjective interpretation of past events helping to dynamically construct one’s present identity. Falout argues that the complex interplay of personal and shared autobiographical histories of past selves therefore helps to mediate both learners’ and teachers’ present emotions and behaviours in language learning settings. With memory being plastic and fallible (in-the-moment emotions in particular appear difficult to reliably recollect), Falout presents some innovative ideas for researching past selves, using example studies focusing on strategic comparison, such as interpersonal comparisons of in-class emotions over time and intrapersonal comparisons of the effectiveness of different L2 teaching methods across age groups. The plasticity of memory would suggest that there is a potentially fruitful opportunity for teachers to help learners subjectively manipulate their recall of learning incidents with an emotional element in order to facilitate future learning goals.

In Chapter 8, Gkonou and Miller adopt a multiple case study approach for their empirical investigation of critical incidents mentioned by 13 English language teachers working in tertiary education programmes in the US and the UK. Interviews allowed the authors to collect critical incident stories from their participants, which emerged spontaneously while they were discussing the role of emotions in their past and current teaching. These stories were classified as critical incidents because they referred to a past event, included emotionally charged discourse, indicated a significant turning point for the teachers’ practice and identity, and were treated as formative. Participants recounted how they dealt with challenging students and how they learned not to take things personally; they also recollected their constant endeavours to understand their students’ emotions and behaviours, and their journey from emotional turmoil to reaping emotional rewards in their workplace. The interviews had an almost therapeutic function, as they allowed teachers to retell the difficult experiences and reflect on them, and even draw lessons for the future on how to deal with difficult students and how to frame students’ behaviours and emotions, as well as the teachers’ own rea...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables, Figures and Images
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction to the Emotional Rollercoaster of Language Teaching
• 2 The Thrills and Ills of Content and Language Integrated Learning
• 3 Utilising the Emotional Labour Scale to Analyse the Form and Extent of Emotional Labour among Foreign Language Teachers in the US Public School System
• 4 Theorising Emotions from a Critical Perspective: English Language Teachers’ Emotion Labour when Responding to Student Writing
• 5 ‘Opening Pandora’s Box’: Language Teachers’ Dynamic Emotional Experiences of Conducting Action Research
• 6 Resilience in Language Teaching: Adaptive and Maladaptive Outcomes in Pre-Service Teachers
• 7 Past L2 Selves, Emotions and Classroom Group Dynamics: The Don’t Ask, Can’t Tell Policy
• 8 ‘Critical Incidents’ in Language Teachers’ Narratives of Emotional Experience
• 9 ‘Please Teach Me How to Teach’: The Emotional Impact of Educational Change
• 10 Investigating Dynamic Changes in Elementary School Teachers’ Anxiety when Teaching English
• 11 Emotion Regulation among University EFL Teachers in Japan: The Dynamic Interplay between Context and Emotional Behaviour
• 12 Should I Stay or Leave? Exploring L2 Teachers’ Profession from an Emotionally Inflected Framework
• 13 Dealing with the Emotions of Teaching Abroad: Searching for Silver Linings in a Difficult Context
• 14 The Well of Language Teachers’ Emotional Well-Being
• 15 What Psychological, Linguistic and Sociobiographical Variables Power EFL/ESL Teachers’ Motivation?
• 16 Concluding Thoughts on the Emotional Rollercoaster of Language Teaching