초등 영어 교사의 감정노동

Primary English school teachers’ emotional labour: Focused on interpersonal relationships

This study aims to examine the emotional labour in relation to English language teaching among Korean primary school teachers. A special focus is placed on a relational factor associated with their emotional labour. For this purpose, purposeful sampling was used to identify ten local primary school teachers who have more than five years of experience teaching English to primary school students. An interview was conducted with each of the ten participants, and content analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data. The results show that there are three groups who are related to the emotional labour of English language teaching among primary school teachers: parents, primary school students and native English speaking teachers. Local English primary school teachers are often situated in power games with the three groups, and teacher professionalism is challenged by the groups, which creates emotionally provocative situations among primary school teachers. The study suggests that we need to develop educational environments in which teacher professionalism is respected in order to reduce emotionally challenging situations.