TEFL University Instructors' Emotional Attitudes towards Their Students, Colleagues and Workplace

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to search TEFL university instructors' emotional attitudes towards their students, colleagues and workplace. To accomplish this aim, a group of 30 Iranian university instructors majoring in one of the four disciplines of English language were participated. The instrument used in this study, was mainly based on a questionnaire designed by Karami and Barekat (2014) in order to ask attitudes of the participants. This questionnaire consists of 56 items under 10 categories: satisfaction, dissatisfaction, interaction with colleagues, anger towards the institutional context, anger towards students, being close to students, emotions and staff, creating rapport, collaboration and general feeling towards your career. In order to analyze the data, the descriptive statistics of each category is calculated. The analysis of data from questionnaire revealed teachers' most significant emotions in each of the 10 categories, which were mostly positive when it came to their students, and more negative in regard of their colleagues and institutional contexts. Based on the obtained results, one can draw the conclusion that EFL teachers need to talk collaboratively about their experiences and emotions.