Mapping the research on language teacher emotion: A systematic literature review

Research on language teacher emotion has gained attention inspired by the “affective turn” since the 1990s, calling for a comprehensive understanding of the extant literature. The current study sought to trace the characteristics of existing empirical studies on language teacher emotion in terms of research foci, methods, and theoretical perspectives through a systematic literature review. Based on evidence from a corpus of 161 empirical studies on language teacher emotion published between 2005 and 2022, a descriptive and quantitative data analysis approach was adopted and a Language Teacher Emotion Model was constructed highlighting three dominant patterns in language teacher emotion research, namely the nature, antecedents, and effects of language teacher emotions. However, the research foci on language teacher emotion shows a notable imbalance. Specifically, the number of studies on language teachers' intrapersonal factors is much more substantial than that on language teachers’ interpersonal factors. Results also revealed a dominance of qualitative methods in the existing language teacher emotion research, and interviews constituted a dominant tool of qualitative data collection. Although various theoretical perspectives under sociological and psychological perspectives were identified, emotion was rarely discussed through a linguistic perspective. This review helps depict the landscape and highlights the directions for future research.