A Study On The Relationship Between English Teachers’ Emotion Work Strategies And Their Job Satisfaction In Senior High School

As more and more people realize the importance of education, theybecome increasingly aware of teachers’ important roles in teaching. Thus, alarge number of studies on teachers are carried out. Among those, studies onteachers’ emotion work or job satisfaction are relatively a lot while studies onthe relationship between the two factors are quite a few.The concept “emotional work” was firstly put forward by Americansociologist Arlie Hochschild as early as in1983. It is acknowledged that thereare three emotion work strategies, namely: surface acting strategy, active deepacting strategy and passive deep acting strategy. Researchers have done lots ofstudies, but the early research work is quite theoretical. There are only a smallnumber of empirical studies on teachers’ emotion work strategies abroad and inChina, there are much fewer. In China, researchers studied on the relationsbetween teachers’ emotion work strategies and their job satisfaction. But, theirresearch work only focuses on a general scale of middle school and primaryschool teachers, which is not targeted on a specific group.This research specifies a certain group of subjects, that is, senior highschool English teachers. Thus, this study is intended to find if English teachers’emotion work strategies are much related to their job satisfaction in senior highschool and how they are related. The instrument of this study is mainlyquestionnaire. The questionnaire is made of three parts, teachers’ basic information, teachers’ emotion work strategies and teachers’ job satisfaction.There are200senior high school English teachers investigated from128keyschools and ordinary school in both urban and rural areas in Hebei Province.SPSS13.0is employed. Major findings are as follows:First, around a quarter of English teachers often or always adopt surfaceacting strategy in their teaching; most of the English teachers investigated oftenor always adopt active deep acting strategy in their teaching; almost all of theEnglish teachers investigated often or always adopt passive deep acting strategyin their teaching.Second, around three fifth of the English teachers investigated think thattheir job is very good for them; about one in ten of the English teachers thinkthat their job is just ok and their job is not very satisfactory; around a third ofthe teachers are not satisfied with their job.Third, English teachers’ surface acting strategy is negatively related to theirjob satisfaction; English teachers’ active deep acting strategy is positivelyrelated to their job satisfaction; English teachers’ passive deep acting strategy isalso positively related to their job satisfaction. All of the correlations above aresignificant.This study helps English teachers reflect on their teaching in that teachersshould adopt more active deep acting strategy and passive deep acting strategyrather than surface acting strategy. This study is also practically important forschool leaders. They should care about teachers’ emotion work and job satisfaction rather than only focus on students’ performance in exams. Inaddition, this study is quite useful for education ministries to make policies.They should try their best to promote the improvement of teachers’ salary,welfares and working conditions.