“Behind the Screen, I Still Care about my Students!”: Exploring the emotional labour of English language teachers in online teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Foreign language teachers’ management of their emotional expression has a significant impact on their classroom teaching and professional development. As the demand for online education continues to grow, researchers are increasingly paying attention to the emotional situations of teachers in online teaching. However, there has been minimal research on secondary school English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic when online teaching became the norm. By combining two lines of investigation, namely, emotional labour and emotion regulation, this study aimed to explore the emotional labour of EFL teachers in online teaching during the pandemic. As a qualitative case study, this research recruited 12 secondary school EFL teachers as participants. Drawing from semi-structured interviews and reflective journals, this paper revealed the nuanced dilemma of EFL teachers’ emotional labour, the emotional rules they followed and the emotional regulation strategies they applied in their online teaching. This study also explored the complexity of the online learning environment in relation to EFL teachers’ emotional labour and analysed the characteristics of teachers’ emotional labour in online teaching compared to face-to-face classroom teaching. The findings confirmed that the change in the teaching situation affected teachers’ emotional labour and underlined the importance of self-emotional management. At the end, this paper called for more attention to the emotional demands of online teaching to cultivate an emotionally healthy environment for EFL teachers.