Emotions and Language Teacher Identity: Conflicts, Vulnerability, and Transformation

Abstract

This study discusses how the shifting teaching context via globalization generates new demands for English language teachers, and how teachers' emotional responses to this shift affect their identity and practice. Based on interviews with five secondary English teachers in South Korea, the study presents these teachers' conflicted stories such as cover and secret stories regarding study abroad returnee students in their classrooms. These stories were analyzed in relation to teachers' emotional experiences of “vulnerability” (Lasky, 2005) to examine how vulnerability affects teachers' orientations to their ongoing professional development—contributing to or preventing their pedagogical and self‐transformation. Teachers who experienced the protective dimension evinced conflicted stories about returnee students, which is grounded in those teachers' own anxiety about their competence and the “sacred story” about the teacher as all‐knowing. The open vulnerability of other teachers, together with their confidence in personal language skills and practice, encouraged attentiveness to individual students and a curriculum of lived experience for both teachers and students. The emotional experiences described in this study allow the subjectivity of language teachers to be traced to its social and institutional contexts.

CLIL teachers in Finland

“…However, although this issue has been scantly investigated in ELT (e.g. Cowie, 2011;Giovanelli, 2015;Moate & Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2017;Song, 2016;Wolff & De Costa, 2017;Yuan & Lee, 2015), it has received negligible attention in scholarly work in CLIL. This study investigates the role of emotions in teacher identity, with a focus on primary CLIL education in Finland.…”

An Investigation of Taiwanese Nursing Students’ English Learning Behaviors and Environmental Factors Related to English Learning before and after Their Internship Experiences—A Case Study

“…On the other hand, it should be paid more attention about those exchange study-abroad returnees' learning attitude and behavior in the classroom, as well as the domestic teachers' belief toward those returnees with better English communication fluency and cultural understanding who might have self-superiority and race-based prejudice of being taught for a period of time by native speakers of English in an English speaking country [40]. Consequently, all the attitude and behavior of those exchange study-abroad returnees might cause teachers or even classmates to feel uncomfortable in the classroom, which might have some negative effects on the exchange study-abroad returnee students on campus.…”

Recommendations for improving international study programs in South Korea: a literature review

“…Despite their elevated levels of authority, Korean instructors have also been shown to suffer from "protective vulnerability" (Song, 2016). A specific cultural expectation characterizes this vulnerability: the expectation that any teacher should be a master of their subject.…”

“…This expectation generates a cultural pressure that punishes teachers by shaming them for not knowing something in their area of expertise. This fear of shame sometimes results in classroom environments where student questions and creativity are discouraged since they might expose limitations in instructor knowledge (Song, 2016). This discouragement has been seen to occur via an active pathway as well as a passive one.…”

“…In the passive pathway, instructors do not directly rebuke students; instead, a general atmosphere of obedience is maintained such that students accept that teachers are not to be questioned. Sometimes this may be enforced by other stakeholders in the class, such as senior classmates, who act as enforcers of the unspoken rule (Song, 2016).…”