Abstract
Teacher well-being has been shown to play a central role in the quality of teaching and student achievement (Day & Gu, 2009; Klusmann, Kunter, Trautwein, Lüdtke, & Baumert, 2008). However, the teaching profession is currently in crisis as it faces record rates of burnout and attrition (Borman & Dowling, 2008; Hong, 2010; Lovewell, 2012), including stressors specific to the changing nature of foreign language teaching (Hiver & Dörnyei, 2015; Wieczorek, 2016) and to higher education (Kinman & Wray, 2013). This study seeks to understand how language teachers perceive of and experience their emotional well-being and what strategies they employ to manage it. Through a series of 12 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with ESL/EFL tertiary-level teachers in the United States, Japan and Austria, we explore a range of contexts examining how participants perceive of factors that add to or detract from their emotional well-being, the challenges and joys these teachers face in their professional and personal lives, and the most salient emotional regulation strategies that they employ to manage their emotions.
About the authors
Kyle TALBOT taught English as a Second Language at the University of Iowa in the United States before enrolling as a PhD student at the University of Graz in Austria. He holds an MA in TESOL/Applied Linguistics from the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls, IA. Currently, he is working as a research assistant and pursuing his PhD in Graz. His research and teaching interests include the psychology of language teaching and learning, language teacher well-being, teacher stress and burnout, and emotions in second language teaching and learning.
Sarah MERCER is Professor of Foreign Language Teaching at the University of Graz, Austria, where she is Head of ELT methodology. Her research interests include all aspects of the psychology surrounding the foreign language learning experience. She is the author, co-author and co-editor of several books in this area including, Towards an Understanding of Language Learner Self-Concept, Psychology for Language Learning, Multiple Perspectives on the Self’ in SLA, New Directions in Language Learning Psychology, Positive Psychology in SLA, Exploring Psychology for Language Teachers (Winner of the IH Ben Warren Prize), and Language Teacher Psychology.
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