Bildiri: Emotional Labor in EFL Teacher–Learner Relationships: Emotional Ecology of EFL Classrooms

Özet

The concept of emotional labor has attained significant position in EFL research; though existing syntheses tend not to focus on the teacher-to-student relationship which serves as the primary site in which emotional labor is created, negotiated, and has implications for both parties. Addressing this gap, the current systematic review synthesized a total of 26 studies between 2017 and 2026 from databases of Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, and Google Scholar. The current review seeks to explore how emotional labor has been conceptualized by EFL teachers and learners as well as to understand the ways in which institutional, pedagogical, technological and sociocultural contexts shape emotional labor. Additionally, the review analyzes how the reciprocity between teachers and students mediates the emotional costs and rewards of emotional labor in EFL/EMI classrooms. The synthesis indicate that EFL teachers’ emotional labor may result in both emotional costs and emotional rewards; while learner emotional labor remains scarcely studied. As such, learners are more typically placed in the role of trigger for, or recipient of, a teacher’s emotional work rather than being positioned as engaged in emotional labor. Findings demonstrate how teachers manage their emotional rules in classroom, and this connection has been further exacerbated by significant changes in the education system and the transition to online education. Furthermore, the majority of findings unearth that emotional labor is also embedded within solidarity and the mutual bonds between teachers and their students. These reciprocal processes can either act as buffers or accelerators to the stress experienced by students and teachers, depending on institutional constraints. By emphasizing the relational aspects of the teacher/learner dynamics, this systematic review contributes an interactional and sociopolitical understanding of emotional labor within the EFL context and identifies future research directions that include: the study of reciprocal emotional work, learner agency, classroom affect, and relational wellbeing. It also identifies several gaps regarding emotional learner labor, gaps in the scrutiny of bidirectional emotional teacher and student dynamics, and a need for longitudinal and intervention-type designs at the core of the research. Finally, implications for EFL teacher education and classroom practice in an emotionally sustainable way are discussed. 

Emine Nisa EROĞLU, Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Rümeysa PEKTAŞ