Language Teachers' Health: Emotions and Wellbeing in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

While most teachers are aware of the importance of students’ wellbeing in the learning process (Cohen, Hoy & Dull, 2020; Hapsari, 2021; Maican & Cocorada, 2021; Pardo-Ballester, 2020; Rossomondo, 2020; Russell 2020), there exists less clarity around the awareness of instructors’ wellbeing within the remote teaching environment (Anderson, Bousselot, Katz-Buoincontro, & Todd, 2021; MacIntyre, Gregersen, & Mercer, 2020; Hartshorn & McMurry, 2020). Recently, universities have shown increasing attention on the importance of instructors’ wellbeing through multiple communication channels such as emails, newsletters, meetings, or general announcements. Research in this area shows that language teachers also suffer from stress, depression, and anxiety (Hartshorn & McMurry, 2020; MacIntyre, Gregersen & Mercer, 2020; Moser, Wei, & Brenner, 2021; Proietti Ergun & Dewaele, 2021; Gregersen, Mercer & MacIntyre, 2021) due to the pandemic, but also due to different stressors related to their work situation (Pardo-Ballester, 2021a).

Today, language teachers are better prepared to design courses and teach different formats from teaching face-to-face (F2F) with a wide range of digital resources (Sosulski, 2020; Ji Xu, Deiffell & Angus, 2021) to more sophisticated and dedicated courses delivered with hybrid, flipped, or online models. The pandemic has prepared us to learn new strategies by focusing on students’ learning and on the actual process of learning a language. We succeeded in doing what we were trained to do. Even those language teachers who never thought of teaching online will now consider this model for personal or pedagogical reasons (Moser et al., 2021; Yi Xu et al., 2021). However, even though the language faculty is better prepared for distance learning, we should have the same autonomy deciding the model of the courses we teach as the autonomy we have when selecting online tools. Some teachers will prefer F2F teaching or blended learning in order to feel the sense of belonging within a language department and maintain social connections with their colleagues and their students. Others will opt for distance learning for reasons such as research, commuting, or difficulties with mobility due to disability issues (Pardo-Ballester, 2021a).

The focus of this chapter is on an under-investigated setting of higher education and language teachers’ psychological consequences, namely emotions and wellbeing, which is subsumed here under the broader field of “health” on four counts: before the Covid-19 pandemic, the onset, during the pandemic, and the future without a pandemic. Even though there have been studies on the beginning of the pandemic with a focus on the transition to emergency online teaching and on the need to create digital communities during the pandemic (Lomicka, 2020), there is a scarcity of studies about prior experience with distance education before the pandemic (Moser et al., 2021). This chapter documents language teachers’ emotions and wellbeing from the emergency online transition in Spring 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic to the end of Spring 2021. It also looks at how language teachers within the United States perceive the future of teaching languages. Therefore, the goals of this chapter are twofold: (1) to identify emotions and wellbeing issues that may be affecting language faculties and their success at their United States institutions and (2) to offer general recommendations to high-level administrators that draw upon language teachers’ perceptions and factors that hinder L2 development in language programs.