Understanding the Ecology of Foreign Language Teacher Wellbeing

Challenges and Resilience-Building: A Narrative Inquiry Study on a Mid-Career Chinese EFL Teacher

“…The experiencing of positive emotions was transformative to people by making them more creative, knowledgable, resilient, socially integregrated, and healthy ( Fredrickson, 2004 ). Contextual resources especially refer to important relationships both within and outside the working context, such as supporting family, trusting colleges, empowering leaders, and resilience-promoting school cultures ( Howard and Johnson, 2004 ; Gu and Day, 2007 ; Gu, 2014 ; Jin et al, 2021 ). Studies reveal strategies to buffer challenges and promote well-being adopted by teachers include problem-solving, work-life balancing, professional learning and reflecting, and emotional boundaries setting ( Hong, 2012 ; Johnson et al, 2014 ; Tait, 2008 ).…”

“…Few studies focus on the risk factors and resilience measures adopted by foreign language teachers in the Chinese context, which is characterized with examination-oriented education and national reform policy ( Fan et al, 2021 ). A further point is worth noting that fewer studies target mid-career or late-career teachers, who face their challenges different from those novice teachers, and the importance of paying special attention to this population of teachers has been increasingly recognized by researchers ( Gu and Day, 2013 ; Day, 2017 ; Fan et al, 2021 ; Jin et al, 2021 ). It is reasonable to pay attention to novice teachers since they are in a typical period of disruption, struggling to adapt to new roles and constructing identities.…”

“…It is reasonable to pay attention to novice teachers since they are in a typical period of disruption, struggling to adapt to new roles and constructing identities. Equally, attention should be paid to mid-career and late-career teachers whose capacity for resilience may become eroded to the extent that survival in the classroom rather than pursuing professional development becomes the main concern ( Gu and Day, 2013 ; Jin et al, 2021 ). As a culturally embedded conception, resilience building is not homogeneous or the context matters ( MacIntyre and Mercer, 2014 ; Gu, 2021 ), so the panoramic research of the novice teachers as well as mid-career teachers in both western and eastern contexts will deepen our understanding of this construct, and benefit the quality education ultimately.…”

Researching and Practicing Positive Psychology in Second/Foreign Language Learning and Teaching: The Past, Current Status and Future Directions

“…With great attention to individuals' well-being (Mercer, 2021 ), positive psychology confronts human problems and difficulties from the perspective of strengths rather than weaknesses (Jin et al, 2021 ). Simply put, while examining the distressing facets of individuals' life were the stock in the trade of psychology for decades, positive psychology has engaged in investigating the positive emotions, strengths, and elements in human experience and psyche (Oxford, 2016 ).…”

“…For years, the domain of educational research was obsessed with investigating negative emotions such as emotions such as anxiety (Marcos-Llinás and Garau, 2009) and burnout (Vaezi and Fallah, 2011) in the instructional context. Discontented with this ever-present focus on negative emotions, researchers inspired by the positive psychology movement have come to realize that not all is negative, and they have attempted to study and encourage eudemonic well-being (Jin et al, 2021;Proietti Ergün and Dewaele, 2021). Positive psychology was first introduced in the seminal work of Seligman and Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000), aiming to advocate a shift in the focus of psychology from a mere concern with fixing the negative and problematic things in life (Gao et al, 2020) to developing positive qualities (MacIntyre, 2021).…”