Sociological understandings of teachers’ emotions in second language classrooms in the context of education/curricular reforms: Directions for future research

Abstract

Effective teaching in second language classroom involves intense positive emotions such as love and passion. Without such emotions, teachers will become less motivated, committed, and self-efficacious in teaching. However, current education/curricular reforms tend to drain the positive emotions of the teachers, resulting in ineffective teaching. Since emotion is both a psychological and social issue, this chapter argues that further studies should study teachers’ emotions in second language classroom from sociological perspectives in addition to psychological perspective. Thus, this chapter attempts to propose a sociological framework to investigate how teachers’ emotions in second language classroom are socially constructed in the context of reforms. At the end, the chapter will propose a research agenda for further studies and discuss the implications to secondary language teacher education based on the proposed sociological framework.