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Teacher well-being has been shown to play a central role in the quality of teaching and student achievement (Day & Gu, 2009; Klusmann, Kunter, Trautwein, Lüdtke, & Baumert, 2008). However, the teaching profession is currently in crisis as it faces record rates of burnout and attrition (Borman & Dowling, 2008; Hong, 2010; Lovewell, 2012), including stressors specific to the changing nature of foreign language teaching (Hiver & Dörnyei, 2015; Wieczorek, 2016) and to higher education (Kinman & Wray, 2013). This study seeks to understand how language teachers perceive of and experience their emotional well-being and what strategies they employ to manage it. Through a series of 12 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with ESL/EFL tertiary-level teachers in the United States, Japan and Austria, we explore a range of contexts examining how participants perceive of factors that add to or detract from their emotional well-being, the challenges and joys these teachers face in their professional and personal lives, and the most salient emotional regulation strategies that they employ to manage their emotions.

Emotional intelligence has not been widely studied in second language acquisition and studies published to date have been questionnaire-based. In this study we take a qualitative approach to focus on how emotional intelligence is used by two participants, one a learner and the other a pre-service teacher. The two focal participants were selected because they showed the most positive movement toward attaining their possible future L2 selves among a larger sample. Analysis shows the ways in which four branches of emotional intelligence inter-acted as respondents worked with three activities adapted from the literature on positive psychology: savouring, three good things, and learned optimism. This paper shows how both the learner and teacher employed emotional intelligence to understand and integrate their experiences inside and outside the classroom as part of the language learning and teaching process.

This study focuses on understanding language teachers’ lived experiences of their stressors and positive uplifts from a holistic perspective covering their professional lives in school, their personal lives beyond, and the connection between the two. The aim was to explore the nature of teachers’ experiences of stress and how they spilled over from work into home domains. We also were keen to understand the dynamics of their experiences of stress and how their perception of daily stressors was related to their overall sense of wellbeing as well as their life and chronic stressors. The data were collected via a specially created app, which collected survey data and experience sampling method (ESM) data from language teachers across the globe. Teachers’ wellbeing was investigated using the PERMA Profiler (Butler & Kern, 2016), their personality using Goldberg’s (1992) Big Five measurement tool, and a questionnaire on chronic stressors and stressful life events. From a larger sample ( n = 47), a set of 6 case studies of teachers who scored highly for wellbeing and those who scored low on wellbeing was examined to explore in depth and across time, the relationships between overall wellbeing, chronic stressors and stressful life events, the experience of daily stressors, and perceptions of health. The findings point to the complexity of the relationships between stress, wellbeing, and health as well as the dynamism of stress and the relationships between stress experienced in the workplace and at home. The study has important implications for research in this area and reveals the merits of working with this innovative data collection tool.

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