“Trying to feel the right feeling for the job”: The emotional labour of English language teachers in state secondary schools in Italy

Abstract

The emotional challenges English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers face and the efforts they deploy to manage their emotions in their day-to-day practice have attracted little scholarly interest in Italy, and yet they are central to any language teacher's working experience. Through semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study explores the experiences of performing emotional labour of eight (six female and two male) EFL teachers in state secondary schools in Italy. The collected data was analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of which reveal that teachers routinely hide or suppress negative emotions and invoke positive feelings in order to perform their job satisfactorily. The teachers’ emotional labour experiences differed greatly depending on the type of school and the pupils’ pedagogical needs, with teaching in vocational schools emerging as particularly demanding. The study also revealed that age and professional experience acted as moderators on the intensity of the teachers’ emotional responses. In addition, the participants deplored the low socioeconomic status and weak social fabric in terms of recognition of teachers’ merit and personal qualities. This contrasted with a clear passion for their jobs, thus resulting in a pleasure-pain axis, which seems to have provided these participants with a disciplinary mechanism for tolerating difficult working conditions. The teachers further concurred on the necessity to be granted psychological support and the opportunity to overtly discuss their unavoidable emotional labour experiences.