theoretical approaches to language teachers' emotions: a critical evaluation

There has historically been an entrenched binary between rationality and emotion with the former taken to be superior to the latter; hence, for both personal and professional success, recommendations abound on how emotions should be ignored, controlled, or best suppressed. recently, awareness of the anthropocentric and transcendental nature of the noted binary has resulted in a new understanding of identity and subjectivity, one consequence of which has been the affective turn in social sciences. there is now a vast body of literature examining language teachers' emotion which have collectively furthered our understanding of how emotionality and affect permeate teaching practices. the noted studies are informed by theoretical positions such as cognitive, biological, social, constructivist, and discursive. the current study seeks to critically examine major theoretical orientations informing inquiry into language teacher emotion. mindful of our own theoretical penchant, we then argue that a discursive, post structural theoretical stance to emotion might provide better affordances for nuancing emotion. we conclude by discussing the strengths and limitations of the post structural stance and offer some possible lines of improvement.