Abstract
Until quite recently, teaching and learning have been regarded as cognitive activities in which teachers merely transmit knowledge to students in a unidirectional manner, causing emotional aspects to be undervalued. The 2013 OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey revealed that teachers in Japan work the longest hours (53.9 h per week; 10.8 h daily during weekdays) among 34 participating regions and countries. It was also found that they lacked self-esteem and self-confidence and that they believed their profession to be not valued in society. The Ministry of Education in Japan recently started releasing a report on the problems affecting the mental well-being of teachers to draw attention to their critical work conditions. The teachers’ low self-esteem and self-confidence can be attributed not only to their work conditions but also to a lack of understanding about their emotionality by policymakers and school administrators. This chapter reports on qualitative research that the author conducted in a Japanese EFL context to investigate English teachers’ emotions as they relate to context-specific socioeducational and sociopolitical factors. The research revealed that top-down imposed foreign language education policies weakened the teachers’ sense of individual and collective self-efficacy and that their emotional well-being was at stake.
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Notes
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More than 90% of ALTs recruited by the government-sponsored JET program are from Inner Circle countries (English-speaking countries, e.g., the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) (Council of Local Authorities for International Relations 2016) (cf., Aoki 2014; Nagamine 2017).
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Nagamine, T. (2018). L2 Teachers’ Professional Burnout and Emotional Stress: Facing Frustration and Demotivation Toward One’s Profession in a Japanese EFL Context. In: Martínez Agudo, J. (eds) Emotions in Second Language Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75438-3_15
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