The Burnout Spiral: The Emotion Labor of Five Rural U.S. Foreign Language Teachers

An area of research that may shed light on the pressing problem of FL teacher attrition is emotion labor. Emotion labor (or emotional labour), a construct stemming from research in the fields of communication and psychology and focusing mainly on service professionals, has recently been taken up in education literature. Although student emotions in language acquisition have been examined, the field of applied linguistics has not yet tapped the explanatory potential of teacher emotions. The current project explores the emotion work of 5 teachers in rural U.S. high school FL classrooms. Thematic analysis of interviews with teachers of Spanish, French, and Latin yielded 5 key insights: perceived lack of community and institutional support for FL teachers, an excessive burden for motivation felt by these teachers, the use of teacher emotion labor to motivate their students, emotional burnout of the teachers, and perceived lack of teacher efficacy. The last two, while not inevitable, seem to be mutually influencing, forming a downward spiral that can eventually impact the willingness or ability of some teachers to continue in their careers. Implications of this study include recognition of the significance of teacher emotion labor in FL pedagogy and its potential role in teacher attrition.