A Study On Senior High School English Teachers’ Emotional Labour In Yunnan Province

Emotional labour(or emotion labor)is currently receiving amount of attention in the context of teaching.Although there were lots of studies relating to emotional labour of students or even teachers,the research of exploring the emotional labour of senior high school English language teachers in China still remain underexplored.Hence the present study intends to investigate the profiles of senior high school English teachers’ emotions and characteristics of their emotional labour.In addition,the beliefs and perceptions of English teachers toward emotional labour are about to explore.The mixed-method approach was adopted in order to solve the research questions.236 English teachers,working in the different senior high schools in Yunnan province,participated in the questionnaire survey in this study.In the stage of interview,there were overall six English teachers engaged in the face-to-face interview.In order to interpret the collected questionnaire data,SPSS 22.0 was used to execute the descriptive and frequency analysis,correlation analysis,independent sample T-test and one-way ANOVA analysis.The findings of the study showed that: 1)the four most frequently selected positive emotion words by teachers were “happiness”,“caring”,“love” and “pride”(successively)and the four most frequently selected negative words in order were “anxiety”,“disappointment”,“loss” and “powerlessness”.Among them,the most felt common emotion word by senior high school English teachers was “anxiety”;2)The overall emotional labour level of teachers was at a medium-to-high level(M=3.06,out of 5).Teachers applied deep acting(DA)emotional labour strategy most frequently to regulate their emotions during the classroom exchanges,while the surface acting(SA)emotional labour strategy was the least one among teachers to choose to control their improper emotions;3)There were significant correlations among the teachers’ three emotional labour strategies: expression of naturally felt emotions(ENFE)emotional labour strategy had a significantly negative correlation with the SA and a significantly positive correlation with DA,but there was no significant correlation between the SA and DA;4)There was significant relationship between SA emotional labour strategy and participants’ demographic variables such as gender and professional titles;5)The English teachers’ emotional labour was reflected on the process of showing warmth towards students,establishing a proper relationship with students and motivating students to learn English.In other words,emotional labour and emotion management was mentioned frequently in the English teaching.The findings of the study may contribute to a better understanding of the senior high school English teachers’ emotional labour and facilitate the development of language teachers’ career.For the last part of the thesis,the pedagogical implications of the findings,limitations of the study and practical suggestions for future research are presented.