Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the relationship between English language teaching (ELT) and teachers' emotions in a publicly-funded US university. It outlines differences between structural and poststructural approaches to emotion labor. Furthermore, in the book, emotion labor is not considered to be pernicious, as it was in Arlie Hochschild's formulation, but rather, inevitably embedded in human interaction and therefore a promising area of investigation and transformation in ELT. The book focuses on one topic about which the several English language (EL) teachers answered questions: high-stakes literacy testing, responding to student writing, plagiarism, and attendance. To give a brief example of feeling rules, the book explores university plagiarism policies prescribe guidelines for detecting and reporting instances of student plagiarism. The book concludes by summarizing the findings, discussing pedagogical implications, and offering suggestions for future emotion-labor research.