EFL Teachers’ Emotional Labor on the Margins: Intercultural Teaching in Chinese Vocational Schools

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Abstract

This qualitative case study investigates how vocational EFL teachers in a fourth-tier Chinese city emotionally navigate the challenge of implementing intercultural communicative competence (ICC) amid policy pressures and professional marginalization. Drawing on Borg’s theory of teacher cognition and Zembylas’s multidimensional theory of teacher emotion, the study reveals how teachers reinterpret cultural teaching through emotional reasoning, identity negotiation, and everyday acts of resistance and care. Situated in an underrepresented educational context, the findings challenge dominant assumptions about policy translation and teacher agency. By centering emotion as a lens of professional sense-making, this study contributes to broader conversations on educational justice and the emotional conditions of teaching in marginalized systems.

Author

• Di Wu, University of Cologne