Abstract:

Language teaching is a highly demanding job that engenders diverse emotions. Teachers’ emotions are central to their professional lives (Benesch, 2012), and can help teachers’ development through a reconstruction of knowledge, competence and skills (Johnson and Golombeck, 2002). Although there is an extensive body of empirical evidence of the impact of emotions on teachers’ practice (Hargreaves, 1998; Day and Leitch, 2001; Sutton, 2004, 2009; Zembylas, 2011), not much attention has been paid to the emotions of language teachers (Cowie, 2011; Benesch, 2012; Golombeck, 2015). Emotions are not only personal dispositions but also social and cultural constructions influenced by interpersonal relationships and systems of social values (Zembylas, 2004). Thus, it is necessary to raise awareness of the effects that emotions can have on language teachers’ personal and professional lives.

This paper presents preliminary results of a qualitative research conducted in Mexico in which participants were English language teachers. Twenty-four teachers in ten public universities were interviewed in order to find out their views on the emotions experienced while performing the different roles expected of them: teacher, researcher, supervisor and administrative. The study purpose was to find out the emotions language teachers experienced because of a diversification of their job in the past decades (Acosta, 2014). This diversification of teachers’ roles included new institutional and evaluation schemes which objective was to increase teaching quality in Mexican tertiary level institutions. Results revealed that the three main sources of foreign language teachers’ emotions are interactions with students, relationships with colleagues and evaluations schemes. By examining the emotions of Mexican language teachers, this paper aims to raise awareness on the need not only to help teachers manage the emotions but also to reshape the figure of tertiary teachers as the cornerstone of public education in Mexico.

Keywords:

Language teaching, emotions, higher education.