The Politics of Emotions in ELT: Structure of Feeling and Anxiety of Korean English Teachers

ABSTRACT

Using the notion of structure of feeling by Raymond Williams, this article seeks to illuminate an ideological understanding of Korean English teachers’ anxiety and deep sense of insecurity in English language teaching (ELT). Through a discussion of how their anxiety is grounded deeply within unequal social relations and how they reframe their anxiety through critical reflection on the cultural and ideological bias of their own anxiety, it points out the intricate relationship between ideology and emotion; teachers’ emotions are shaped by dominant ideologies that constitute the social structures constraining their position as teachers, while their engagement with those emotions also enables their self-transformation towards gaining confidence as teachers. The results of the study emphasise the tension between social structure and agency in teachers’ emotional experiences and discuss implications for teacher education and development.

KEYWORDS:

• Structure of feeling
• emotion
• English language teaching (ELT)
• Korean English teachers
• language ideology
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juyoung Song

Juyoung Song is an associaote professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Murray State Univesity, USA. Her research interests include language teaching and learning in its sociocultural context, particularly issues regarding language ideology, identity and emotion. She co-edited Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Education: Language, Literacy and Culture (Routledge, 2010) and has a forthcoming book, Learning a Non-English Second Language at Multilingual Universities: Internationalization, Neoliberalism, and Emergent Translingual Practices (Multilingual Matters).

Joseph Sung-Yul Park

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He studies the politics of English as a global language in the context of neoliberalism and transnationalism. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language (Mouton, 2009), Markets of English (with Lionel Wee; Routledge, 2012) and English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).