Beginning EFL Teachers' Emotional Labor Strategies in the Chinese Context

Abstract

Teachers' emotional labor strategies have been explored in different cultural contexts. However, beginning English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers have received scant research attention. This study seeks to conceptualize emotional labor strategies among Chinese beginning EFL teachers and investigate their general profiles. The developed Beginning EFL Teachers' Emotional Labor Strategy Scale was assessed among 484 Chinese beginning secondary school EFL teachers. A final 20-item scale was obtained after a series of reliability (e.g., item analysis, internal consistency, composite reliability) and validity tests (e.g., construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity). The confirmatory factor analysis results supported the four-dimensional structure of emotional labor strategies in the beginning EFL teacher sample, encompassing surface acting, deep acting, positive consonance, and negative consonance. In addition, participants reported high levels of positive consonance and deep acting, and low levels of surface acting and negative consonance. Possible reasons for this are discussed in reference to the EFL educational context in China. The findings provide insights into sustainable development for Chinese beginning secondary school EFL teachers.

“Teachers' Emotional Labor” Publications in Web of Science: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The potentially significant difference requires that appropriate research focuses and research methods are adopted. On the one hand, because of the long duration of the service, episodes and chronic stressors (e.g., repeated experiences of unpleasant emotions) should become two interesting research focuses for future research endeavors; in light of the complexity of teaching contexts, subject-specific TEL and culture-specific TEL (e.g., Li and Liu, 2021 ) deserve future research attention. In contrast, as Dewaele and Wu ( 2021 , p. 103) suggested, longitudinal designs may help “establish whether teachers' preferences change over time,” and that intervention studies and training may help teachers better regulate their emotions.…”

Emotional Labor in Teaching Chinese as an Additional Language in a Family-Based Context in New Zealand: A Chinese Teacher’s Case

“…On the whole, how CB’s emotions developed was determined by her relationship with the students as well as with herself ( Dewaele et al, 2018 ; Benesch, 2020 ; Li and Liu, 2021 ). The sound relationship was based on reducing the discrepancies (e.g., Mother A’s complaint and apology and CB’s actual self and expected self) and arriving at mutual understandings (i.e., trust, responsiveness, and empathy; e.g., her shared identities with Mother A and Family B; Gkonou and Mercer, 2017 ; Benesch, 2020 ).…”

“…In educational research, “emotion” is commonly analyzed with cognitive ( Benesch, 2020 ) and discursive approaches ( Zembylas, 2005a ; Benesch, 2020 ; Li and Liu, 2021 ). Within a cognitive framework, teachers’ emotions, as privately experienced psychological phenomena ( Benesch, 2020 ), are related to teachers’ identities ( Pavlenko, 2003 ; Park, 2012 ; Zhang and Zhang, 2015 ; Fairley, 2020 ), instructional practices, teacher–student relationships ( Hagenauer and Volet, 2014 ; Zhang and Zhang, 2020 ), and teachers’ professional development ( Song, 2018 ).…”

From a Novice Teacher to a Teacher Leader: An English-As-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) Teacher’s Cognitions About Her Professional Development

“… Liu et al (2020) investigated the role of overseas academic visiting in language teacher development. Beginning EFL teachers’ emotional labor strategies ( Li and Liu, 2021 ), EFL teachers professional qualities ( Chu et al, 2021 ; Liu et al, 2021b ), and EFL teacher resilience ( Liu and Chu, 2022 ) in a Chinese context were also explored. Ji et al (2022) explored pre-service teachers’ pedagogical decisions on integrated-skill instruction in a Chinese context.…”

“…Studies of language teacher cognition mainly focus on conceptual and terminological understandings of teacher cognition (e.g., Shulman, 1986 ; Borg, 2003 ; Kubanyiova and Feryok, 2015 ), factors affecting the development of teacher cognition (e.g., Li and Liu, 2021 ; Liu et al, 2021a , 2022 ), relationships between teacher cognition and their actual classroom instructional practices ( Borg, 2015 ; Bao, 2017 ; Chen, 2017 ; Sun, 2017 ). Teachers’ voices, in contrast, remain severely under researched.…”