L2 Teachers’ Emotions: A Sociopolitical and Ideological Perspective

Abstract

Following the sociocultural turn (e.g., Zembylas in Teaching with emotion: a postmodern enactment. Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, CT, 2005a) in teacher emotion research, we explore second language (L2) teacher emotions from a critical perspective. Such a perspective extends Benesch’s (Considering emotions in critical English language teaching: theories and praxis. Routledge/Taylor & Francis, New York, 2012) examination of teacher emotions from a broad sociopolitical perspective and De Costa and Norton’s (Mod Lang J 101-S:3–14, 2017) recent call to investigate social issues that L2 teachers face in light of neoliberal impulses within education. We also argue that critically-inflected teacher emotion research needs to take into consideration the social ecologies in which teachers are embedded. As Khong and Saito (Educ Rev 66(2):210–225, 2014) rightly observe, teacher emotions are shaped by social, institutional, and personal forces, a point that is instantiated in Wolff and De Costa (Mod Lang J 101(S1):76–90, 2017), who illustrated how the emotions of their focal teacher were shaped by macro-level (e.g., language policy), meso-level (e.g., the school environment), and micro-level (e.g., teacher identity) forces. Building on these developments, we trace how two Mathematics teachers in English medium of instruction high schools in China and Nepal, respectively, managed their emotions as they used language and other affordances to accomplish their pedagogical goals and accommodate students’ diverse needs in these two distinct contexts.