Emotion labor and affect in transnational encounters: Insights from Western-trained TESOL professionals in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Informed by an ethnographic qualitative research study conducted with expatriate teachers of English in Saudi Arabia, we examine emotion(al) labor in the context of transnational mobilities with regards to cultural and institutional tensions. Engaged with wide-ranging interdisciplinary literature on emotion and affect, we discuss the place of transnational emotion(al) labor in four inter-related manifestations: (a) struggles and efforts to interact and communicate with students; (b) internalization and resentment of privilege and deficiency underlying discourses of native speakers; (c) responses to challenges from social, religious, and cultural difference; and (d) prolonged endurance, frustration, helplessness, and resistance to prescribed curriculum, testing, and top-down policy and practice. We also incorporate our reflections and emotion(al) labor as transnationally trained academics as we engage with the participants’ accounts. We show how our study could inspire dialogues with the self and conversations among researchers for support and solidarity beyond constructed boundaries of race, language, religion, ethnicity, and nationality.

Introduction

For decades, the global drive towards English has enabled English language teachers at all levels to move around the globe for employment purposes. Likewise, the growing demand for English globally has also created opportunities for many English-speaking individuals to work as teachers of English in almost every country and territory. These teachers are indeed at the forefront of transnational mobilities. They also contribute to the growth of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Existing scholarly inquiries centered on these transnational/international TESOL teachers/professionals include their (transnational) identity formation, their attitudes and experiences teaching English transnationally/internationally, their professional growth and pedagogical innovation, and their negotiations of teaching pedagogy and (inter)cultural issues and linguistic capabilities (for instance, Bright and Phan, 2011; Jenkins, 2019; Kostogriz and Bonar, 2019; Menard-Warwick, 2008; Petrol, 2009; Poole, 2019; Rose et al., 2020; Stanley, 2013; Stewart, 2020). The surveyed literature has also raised many concerns surrounding the continued endorsement of Western superiority in English language education and other ethical issues involving race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and ideology, as well as risks and precarities associated with short-term employment contracts and TESOL teachers’ lack of appropriate teaching qualifications and experience.

Thousands of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers working in Saudi Arabia are from overseas and of hugely diverse cultural, social, ethnic, academic, linguistic, and professional backgrounds (cf. Mahboob and Elyas, 2014; Phan and Barnawi, forthcoming; Shah and Elyas, 2019). They have moved to Saudi Arabia for many different reasons, including competitive salaries and benefits, religious pursuits, personal reasons, career moves, or unemployment back home. While many of them appear unqualified, many others have extensive international teaching experience (Jenkins, 2019; Phan and Barnawi, forthcoming). The growing demand for international TESOL professionals corresponds to Saudi Arabia’s boost for more English at all levels of schooling and for the expansion of English-medium instruction courses and programs at the university level. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 introduced in 2016 to diversify the country’s economy and to aspire to be at the forefront of modernization and technology advancements is believed to make the country even more aggressive in embracing English and English language education.

The strong presence of native-English-speaking teachers in Saudi Arabia as well as advertisements of English language teaching jobs that target and favor native-English-speaking Westerners have contributed to rather negative views towards this teacher population (Barnawi, 2018; Barnawi and Phan, 2015; Mahboob and Elyas, 2014; Phan and Barnawi, 2015). These teachers are often criticized for generating problems in Saudi EFL classrooms and are largely projected as being unqualified, inexperienced, incapable, monolingual, money-driven, and unresponsive to Saudi students’ needs. However, this proposition needs to be challenged, following our large-scale study conducted with more than 200 international teachers in Saudi Arabia (Phan and Barnawi, forthcoming) and as we have done in the present study. These expatriate teachers go through multiple layers of difficulties, some of which come from their institutions and the wider social and cultural factors that often depict them as a uniform group of foreigners who enjoy privileges and are ignorant of the society and religion. Their struggles, difficulties, emotions, and attempts to communicate their emotions have, hence, been overlooked.

This article brings into the existing literature a different angle for viewing transnational language teacher mobilities, which is emotion(al) labor and affect in the workplace. Drawing on a qualitative research study that examines classroom and assessment experiences of transnational/international TESOL teachers at a university in Saudi Arabia, the article shows these teachers’ complex transnational emotion(al) labor and their affective displays. They engaged in complex interactions with themselves, their professional training and experience, their students and the institution where they work, and the broader cultural, social, and religious surroundings of Saudi Arabia. These teachers also expressed explicit appreciation at being invited to participate in our study, seeing their participation as a way to communicate their emotional capital and emotion(al) labor. Such interactions and expressions, conveyed in varied forms and intensities, are manifestations of emotion(al) labor and affect shouldered by English language teachers in transnational contexts, which remains under-researched and, therefore, demands more scholarly investigation.

Emotion and affect, emotion(al) labor, and affective practice

Emotional labor refers to the self-regulation, self-management, and commodification of emotion as one is expected to observe and follow workplace rules, guidelines, protocols, procedures, terms, norms, policies, and mandates (Hochschild, 1979, 1983). These workplace standards assume and expect particular behaviors, consumption, and displays of emotion that are deemed to be appropriate, acceptable, desirable, and professional, which Hochschild (1983) theorizes as workplace feeling rules (cited in Benesch, 2019: 531). Workplace feeling rules and their underlying connotations vary according to contexts and each specific workplace, and power is often at the core of such rules and connotations. Studying and conceptualizing emotional labor, hence, ought to recognize the role of power and the sociopolitical dimension of the (work)place so as to understand the multiple layers of factors and pressures shaping teachers’ emotion labor. Drawing on carefully discussed scholarship in this area, Benesch (2019, 2020) argues for the conceptualization of what she terms “emotion labor” as being discursive and socially shaped by wider sociopolitical and institutional norms, power relations, and practices. While we largely engage with Benesch’s conceptualization and theorization of emotion labor in this article, we also bring into the conversation other related theoretical discussions that place emotion labor in complex relationships with emotion, affect, and emotional capital, as elaborated below.

Emotion and affect are interdisciplinary, complex, and contested concepts, bearing multiple theoretical underpinnings and conceptual foundations within and across disciplines (Ahmed, 2004; Al-deen and Windle, 2016; Benesch, 2019, 2020; Bigelow, 2019; Prior, 2019; Wetherell, 2015). Scholars in applied linguistics and language education, for the past decade, have been raising concerns about the lack of scholarly attention to emotion and affect as well as the under-theorization of these constructs, and have thus called for an “affective turn” (see Prior, 2019: 516 for more details). This “affective turn” has resulted from sustained critiques of certain works on psychology and on language and learning theories that fixate on the cognitive and bodily inherent traits of emotion and affect. Likewise, the “affective turn” counters works that detach emotion and affect from social, cultural, and political histories and conditions.

The “affective turn” in applied linguistics and language education takes place alongside the re-emergence of affect “as a key site in social and cultural research” (Wetherell, 2015: 139). In thoroughly reviewing several highly influential lines of scholarly works on affect and emotion, Wetherell (2015) shows how certain theorizations are contributing to the categorization and hierarchization of emotions and affects into rigid establishments such as strong and weak, positive and negative, and low and high. Such establishments often subject individuals, communities, and groups into stereotypes that could sideline critical questions of inequality, ethics, and gender politics. They also risk leading research on affect to a dead end because of their inherent biases and flaws. These categorized and hierarchized establishments of affect cannot help explain complexly diverse emotional responses either. Wetherell (2015) praises Ahmed’s (2004) widely cited cultural politics of emotion and representation for its rigorous and sophisticated engagement with the cultural politics and relationality of affect and recognizes its tremendous scholarly contributions that speak to scholars in multiple fields. Nonetheless, Wetherell (2015) has pointed out flaws in Ahmed’s analytical framework, particularly its hard-to-understand depersonalization of emotion and affect, given Ahmed’s highly sophisticated conceptualization of emotion. This problem, as Wetherell argues, leads to emotion/affect floating out there and being detached from the person/body/mind. So to move scholarship on emotion/affect forward, Wetherell (2015) offers her theorization of affective practice as follows, which we find helpful for our study:

[A practice approach emphasizes] relationality and negotiation, attentive to the flow of affecting episodes. A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships. (Wetherell, 2015: 139)

Wetherell’s (2015) critique of Ahmed (2004) echoes Prior (2019) and Schumann (2019), who are also critical of approaches to emotion that rely almost exclusively on sociocultural, political, historical, and contextual factors and simultaneously disregard human minds and undermine their complexities. The critiques from these scholars, to some extent, apply to Benesch’s (2020) justification to use emotion labor instead of emotional labor—the more commonly used term.

My use of “emotion labor” rather than the more commonly used “emotional labor” is due to the negative connotation of “emotional,” a term often used to suggest that someone, especially a woman, is behaving in an overwrought and socially undesirable manner. Furthermore, by linking “emotion” and “labor,” I am emphasizing the relationship between emotions and power rather than qualifying the labor as emotional. (Benesch, 2020: 14)

Benesch’s critiques of emotional in emotional labor appear to be a little at odds with Al-deen and Windle (2016), who affirm the importance of emotional labor in their study on Muslim Iraqi immigrant mothers’ involvement with their children’s education in Australia. Firmly located in a Bourdieusian framework of capital and in the emerging scholarship on emotional capital, Al-deen and Windle show “how emotional labor is situated differently in relation to cultural, institutional and market hierarchies for a particular group of mothers who have moved between social fields through the process of migration” (2016: 2). Importantly, they indicate these mothers all see their emotional labor as a domestic and moral responsibility concerning their involvement in their children’s education. Nevertheless, whether or not their emotional labor is recognized as capital depends on the relationships between emotional capital and other forms of capital that these mothers possess, accumulate, display, and reflect on. By analyzing these mothers’ emotional labor in relation to emotional capital and discourses on motherhood, neoliberalism, and Islam and Muslims, Al-deen and Windle (2016) point to the complex nature of emotional labor, showing a wide range of emotions expressed, enacted, adopted, and cultivated by their female participants in transnational space. Importantly, their focus on emotional labor does not suggest that labor is emotional but, instead, solidifies the need to engage critically with a range of emotions in the context of transnational migration and neoliberalism. We find their work relevant to our study as well.

Among on-going interdisciplinary conversations on emotion and affect, we also find Benesch (2019, 2020) highly pertinent to our study. Specifically, Benesch’s (2019) theorization of emotion labor from a sociopolitical stance, much influenced by Ahmed (2004), highlights the multiple roles of social practice, power, and human agency in studying emotion. These constructs take into account the dynamic, dialogic, and multi-directional entanglements of emotion/affect which occur and are generated in not only specific and personalized but also in more general contexts, settings, and situations. Benesch’s (2019) theorization questions social discourses and explains systemic racism and privilege. It places blames for wrongdoings on institutions and their policies, rules, and regulations rather than on individuals. We also see this line of argument evident in Benesch (2020) on emotion labor and activism, although Benesch (2020) does not refer to Ahmed (2004).

For Benesch (2020), emotion ought to be conceptualized as being discursive and socially constructed, whereby prejudice, power, hierarchy, inequality, injustice, and agency ought to be identified and addressed. She argues that emotion is driven and generated by certain institutional, cultural, social, and historical circumstances, and emphasizes the relationship between emotions and power. Benesch (2020) shows how the English language instructors at her own university in the United States expressed a sense of ambivalence when it comes to high-stake standardized testing. Specifically, these teachers acknowledged the inevitable aspect of testing (“discourse of inevitability”) but also indicated problems associated with this kind of test, noting their students’ immigrant backgrounds and their likely unfamiliarity with certain elements of the test (“discourse of unfairness”) (Benesch, 2020: 8). Intertwined with this sense of ambivalence, these teachers recognized issues with discrimination and exclusion embedded in their university’s practices that prevented non-native students of English from “pursuing their degrees in a timely manner” (“discourse of injustice”) (2020: 10). Benesch (2020) then sees teachers’ emotion labor as powerful sources of activism that could be engaged with, mobilized, and invited to bring about positive changes to the system, to demand equity and justice as well as academic freedom for both teachers and students. Hence, instead of handling emotion privately to adjust to the institutional demand and to come to terms with the ambivalence discussed above, teachers can come together and communicate their emotion labor in a productive and empowering manner for the collective betterment of pedagogy, teaching, and learning.

However, up to this point, we feel there is a missing element: the inter-individual. And for this we turn to our own work. Specifically, Phan’s most recent work engages with and builds on Vološinov’s (1929/1986, 1929/2017) theorization of ideology to examine affect/emotion displayed in personal and artistic encounters with English (Phan and Bao, 2019).

For Vološinov, ideology and power are lived and felt, integral to the processes of living and feeling, which are social, inter-personal and inter-individual. He viewed the individual psyche as having a social origin, and as such one’s inner voice is never detached from the social individual. The inner voice, the individual and the inter-individual interact and communicate through signs whose meanings are shaped by multiple and changing contexts. (Phan and Bao, 2019: 240)

Seeing ideology and power as “lived and felt” does not reject the metaphysics and metanarratives of contexts and meaning making, while making prominent “a politics of the self” that anchors in the self’s complex and dynamic social, inter-personal, and inter-individual multiplicities, moments, experiences, encounters, responses, and articulations (Phan and Bao, 2019: 241). Through emphases on the social inter-individual and its multifaceted dialogues with others and with its immediate and far-out contexts as the authors reflect on their personal and professional experiences with English, Phan and Bao (2019) share some common grounds with and complement Ahmed’s (2004) cultural politics of emotion, Benesch’s (2019, 2020) theorization of emotion and emotion labor, Al-deen and Windle’s (2016) discussion of emotional labor and emotional capital, and Wetherell’s (2015) affective practice framework. We use emotion(al) labor throughout the article to signify the complex intertwined-ness explained above.

We approached the study design, data collection, and data analysis and interpretation from a critical ethnographic vantage point (Creswell, 2014; Stanley, 2013). Critical ethnography has been employed to examine the teaching and learning of language in diverse cultures and to study teacher and learner identity; and it has helped researchers understand the cognitive, sociocultural, and critical perspectives of language teaching and learning in more depth and with more nuances. We have approached this methodology keenly aware of the power dynamics and of ideology and power as lived and felt that the surveyed literature on emotion and affect pinpoints. This approach also corresponds well with our discussion of emotion, affect, and emotion(al) labor, particularly the relationality of emotion, power, discourse, representation, practice, negotiation, and sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts.

We recognize the importance of differentiating our participants’ emotions from our own emotions and from our responses to and interpretations of emotions (Prior, 2019). Hence, together with presenting the data collected with the participants, we also include in this article our own reflections during the data collection. In particular, Abdullah, who directly collected the data for this study, has reflected on his past experience as an international teaching assistant teaching in a writing composition program in a US university while pursuing his PhD. Abdullah has also reflected on his current academic position as an assistant professor teaching writing and composition in a Saudi university. Abdullah’s transnational experiences and exposures enable him to relate to the participants’ responses and varied emotions. The communications Abdullah had with the participants came from an interactive and engaged perspective as Abdullah sought to situate their experiences, pedagogies, and ideologies about teaching and assessment in Saudi EFL classrooms. For example, he felt he understood their anxiety when their teaching and performance were constantly observed and evaluated by their Saudi students, peers, and institution, precisely because while teaching in the US his teaching was also evaluated by his students and by the writing program administrator who observed his classes and then provided him with feedback. Abdullah, in those days, felt threatened by these evaluation acts because he was the only non-US international teacher in the writing program. He acknowledged being worried about being judged because of his Saudi accent and limited knowledge of American society and culture. Abdullah’s reflections and emotion(al) labor offer us critical and reflexive lenses to engage with nuanced emotion(al) labor experienced by international native-speaking TESOL teachers in EFL contexts. This very dimension of transnational academic mobility remains un(der)explored.

The immediate context: The English language program, writing assessment at Mannar University, and meeting the teachers

Our participants teach English writing in the foundation program at Mannar University in Saudi Arabia. There are two English learning tracks in the program: an academic track and the general track that students have to take and pass before they can start their majors at the university. Both tracks have four levels that follow the Common European Framework of Reference descriptors (CEFR). Those levels are A1, A2, B1, and B2. Writing instruction is integrated into the other language skills: listening, speaking, and reading; and no separate, stand-alone writing classes are offered. Simply put, each unit includes a writing lesson that addresses different topics varying from basic writing issues to more complicated genres depending on the course level.

All teachers, Saudi and non-Saudi, have to follow the same prescribed writing curriculum, pacing guide, and assessment tools that are all aligned with the CEFR and designed by the English language program at Mannar. The “Reading, Writing, and Critical Thinking” book in the Unlock textbook series by Cambridge University Press is mandated for the English academic track. The main writing assessment tools used are time-driven exam systems used for the purpose of preventing memorizing and plagiarism. The university also mandates cross grading for writing exams. Therefore, teachers are neither allowed to grade their students’ exam papers nor invigilate exam sessions. All teachers must exchange their students’ exam papers with another section teacher. After that, they receive their students’ exam papers graded based on an analytic rubric and then they have to discuss with each of their own students the feedback on their exam papers that are graded by another teacher. If any room exists for these teachers to implement their own writing assessment tools, they might apply their assessment techniques to in-class activities during writing instruction. However, teachers cannot assign any grades to their students’ writing pieces because those grades are not counted towards their final grade. For our study, we only focused on teachers who teach in the academic track, whereby more writing instruction and more writing assessment are required. In the academic track, students take two exams: a mid-term module writing exam and a final module exam.

Four international non-Muslim Caucasian native-English-speaking TESOL professionals at Mannar University were deliberately chosen as participants: Ian, Jonathan, John, and Shaun (pseudonyms). All of them were born, raised, and educated in their native countries: Australia, England, the United States, and Ireland respectively. They were chosen also because they each had been teaching writing at Mannar University for more than three years, and thus would be able to reflect on their accumulated experience. They were also committed to the intensive data collection required by this study.

The teachers moved to Saudi Arabia with years of language and writing/composition teaching experience in other contexts. They spent an extended period of time teaching English in their own countries and then in EFL countries such as Japan, Korea, and Oman before their current appointments in Saudi Arabia. They all hold relevant degrees and certificates that are required of English language teachers. Alongside teaching, these teachers also provide service to Mannar University including coordinating teaching units, developing online materials, and running professional development workshops. The participants’ profiles show that they are experienced, exposed, and qualified teachers for the job. They showed a high degree of willingness to participate in our study, knowing that their participation would require in-depth and critical examination of their own teaching and pedagogical decisions involving assessment and writing instruction. Likewise, as they revealed to Abdullah, sharing their experiences and beliefs through the study also helped them acknowledge their emotions and emotion(al) labor.

We got to know the teachers better through an intensive data collection exercise. During an academic semester, Abdullah observed two classes from each teacher: one 50-minute teaching session and one 50-minute assessment feedback session after the mid-module writing exam. Observation notes and reflections were written down in Abdullah’s journals during and after each session. Abdullah also video-recorded these sessions to capture the class vibe as well as teacher–student interactions and student–student interactions to assist his observations and to co-relate with his written notes. Then, Abdullah conducted semi-structured interviews with the teachers to ask about their views and experience regarding their classroom teaching and the assessment practice and policy in their English language program. Abdullah also asked the teachers about what he had observed in their sessions and sought their explanations and clarifications. The main aim of these interviews was to gain a more extended and deeper knowledge of the transnational EFL teachers’ emotions and emotion(a) labor as they shared with us their beliefs, experiences, attitudes, concerns, suggestions, and pedagogical practices.

The in-depth data collected with the teachers have revealed layers of challenges they have been facing in teaching writing and dealing with writing assessment at Mannar, as the rest of the article shows.

Emotion, emotional capital, and emotion(al) labor efforts to communicate with students

In this section, we show emotion(al) labor and emotional capital as expressed and felt in the participants’ experiences of their day-to-day reality of teaching and assessment. In particular, we show how students’ low English language proficiency combined with teachers’ inability to speak Arabic could cause complex emotions and emotion(al) labor while also revealing emotional capital that is often hidden.

Previous studies have explored the challenges and difficulties encountered by Arab learners (including Saudis) and their teachers in EFL classrooms (Ahmed, 2018; Massri, 2019; Obeid, 2017). Arab learners who lack the basics of grammar find writing particularly difficult when it requires them to think in English and to perform a writing task (Doushaq, 1986; Javid and Umer, 2014; Mohammad and Hazarika, 2016). Many Arab students with weak language skills and knowledge also tend to develop a negative attitude toward foreign language writing (Shukri, 2014). Local EFL teachers with a basic knowledge of the context and of students’ writing needs can cope with these challenges more effectively (Hyland, 2003), as compared to expatriate teachers who do not speak Arabic. When recruiters and institutions in Saudi Arabia are still inclined to employ non-Arabic-speaking international teachers to teach English, these reported problems continue to exist. These expatriate teachers often find it hard to teach writing and to conduct assessment with those students (Arnold, 2018; Ezza, 2017; Ghalib and Al-Hattami, 2015). This situation generates varied emotion(al) labor within and among teachers.

According to Abdullah’s observation notes, the majority of students in all the observed classes struggled with the most basic language level in writing, although they were already at the highest levels (levels 3 and 4) in the English academic track program.

Their language proficiencies and writing skills were generally very low. Their vocabulary range was limited and basic, which required the teachers to spend most of the class time on word building and sentence level writing activities with students. Their language was not enough for effective or elaborate conversations that involved more complex explanations and a higher thinking level. (Abdullah’s notes)

During the interviews with Abdullah, the teachers uniformly commented on the low language level among their Saudi students. They also revealed they found it challenging to have to improve students’ language proficiencies and writing skills and to communicate with them about feedback and assessment, particularly when many students had not acquired sufficient grammatical knowledge and vocabulary to perform writing tasks that go beyond the level of making sentences. For example, Shaun (with decades of experience in several educational systems and more than 10 years of teaching English in the Gulf region) commented:

The Saudi EFL learners lack the basic knowledge of the writing schemes. I guess they have a very weak schooling at their primary and secondary levels. Especially the lower level students always find it difficult to write a correct sentence. This presents lots of challenges to teaching and assessment. (Shaun, interview)

The teachers all expressed their concerns and frustrations about students’ language proficiencies and seeming lack of interest in learning about writing. Ian showed his disappointment about “how once students go to write an essay in exams, everything they have already done vanishes.” As he spoke to Abdullah, Ian raised his hands in a gesture of making something disappear and shrugged his shoulders in exasperation. Like Ian, Jonathan and John could not understand how students could do so poorly with writing. This frustrated them immensely. As a teacher of English himself, Abdullah also admitted in his notes that “few teachers want to teach writing” because “many students just don’t care.” This shared emotion and emotion(al) labor as recognition of challenges should not be seen as teachers’ failure and/or incompetence in managing and handling their negative emotions as we later show when we juxtapose such emotion and emotion(al) labor in relation to prejudice, power, agency, discourse, and institutional imposition (Benesch, 2020; Wetherell, 2015).

Students’ low English language proficiencies and the teachers’ inabilities to speak Arabic also made it unrealistic for teachers to engage students in peer assessment writing activities, as mandated by the university.

Being a transnational teacher, it becomes so difficult to help them as their proficiency level does not allow them to comprehend my peer assessment activities and my lack of their L1 does not permit me to communicate or translate the words for them. I believe that lower level students should be taught by bilingual teachers who can speak Arabic or understand the basic needs of the students. (Shaun, interview)

Ian also admitted that during his feedback sessions with students, he was frustrated with them for not being able to understand his explanations. He was also frustrated with himself for not being able to answer their questions and to get his points across. The language barrier between him and his students was an obvious obstacle. As Shaun indicated, “being a transnational teacher” is not seen as desirable capital in these teachers’ case, particularly when it exposes their perceived weakness, incapability, and “lacking,” which is at odds with the widely promoted desirable image of them as international teachers and native speakers of English. We elaborate this point in subsequent sections. This finding correlates with other articles in this Special Issue such as Karakas (2020) and Phan and Mohamad (2020).

Despite their dissatisfaction with students’ low language proficiency and lack of interest in writing, the teachers still felt the need and responsibility to care. For example, they noticed students’ habit of reproducing memorized sentences in exams and thus wanted to alert students to the danger of unintended plagiarism. As they tried to convey the message, however, they were also afraid that students would not understand the problem and hence misunderstand their good intention due to their limited language. Ian (more than 10 years’ experience teaching English in several countries), for instance, reported:

Lower level students are good at rote learning. They often learn written sentences by heart and reproduce them in a writing exam. Assessing and grading such scripts is never easy. It is not easy to convince them that they have done something wrong or they must not memorize sentences. Their language is insufficient for me to explain to them that this is wrong. I’m nervous if they take it in the wrong way. (Ian, interview)

Here, emotional capital and emotion(al) labor were displayed and expressed in the conduct of care and responsibility (Al-deen and Windle, 2016), under the self-awareness of doubt and vulnerability, and with certain feelings and affects from within the teachers (Phan and Bao, 2019; Wetherell, 2015).

In addition, as the teachers acknowledged they did not speak Arabic and had not learnt it, they also admitted it would be better for bilingual teachers to teach Saudi students with limited English. This acknowledgment is consistent with the dominant projection of native-English-speaking teachers as “monolinguals.” They admitted being aware of this “shortcoming” and saw it as their “weak point” and “disadvantage” in comparison with Saudi teachers or Arab teachers who could also speak Arabic, as they revealed further in the interviews. Their acknowledgment of the important role of bilingual teachers also confirms the problem associated with the blanket recruitment of native speakers in many countries including Saudi Arabia (Akcan, 2016; Mahboob and Elyas, 2014). The teachers challenged the discourse that native teachers are better and challenged native-speakerism more broadly (Holliday, 2005). This awareness and sensibility can be seen as their emotional capital (Al-deen and Windle, 2016).

All in all, the teachers acknowledged their struggles and difficulties in their classroom teaching and in conducting peer assessment activities with students. Their emotional labor lies in their felt responsibility to help with students’ learning and is displayed in their helplessness because of the language barrier and other factors that we shall discuss in the subsequent sections. Ian, Shaun, John, and Jonathan are “qualified and experienced teachers” with additional expertise in “writing composition” and “test item writing.” However, little of their capital was utilized and put to good use when their students could not benefit from their teaching and expertise. This reality led to frustration, disillusion, and indifference, which the teachers attributed to the way “the system operates.” The findings here correspond with the teachers of English in Benesch’s (2020) study who also experienced professional unfulfillment because of undesirable institutional factors.

Emotion(al) labor and the ideology of native-speakerism

The participants also revealed hidden emotions and emotion(al) labor that they rarely expressed to anyone outside their closed circle. They admitted they were aware of the privilege and negative views attached to their White, male, native speaker status (Appleby, 2013; Jenkins, 2019; Kubota and Lin, 2009; Stanley, 2013). Nonetheless, they reported being “uncomfortable” and “undermined” when this label was assumed to be their only identity. Moreover, the fixation on their privilege tended to “overlook” the fact that they were teachers with “aspirations, feelings, emotions, and problems.” Accompanying “the privilege” had been “struggles” that they had “no place to vent” and “no reasons to complain” because of the attached privilege. This awareness and internalization made it “awkward” to even “mention any problems” they may have. This very emotional labor connects with Al-deen and Windle’s (2016) discussion of the Muslim Iraqi immigrant mothers’ involvement in their children’s education in Australia, in that their emotional labor is shaped by their acknowledged, unacknowledged, rejected, denied, and under-valued emotional, social, and cultural capital.

The teachers felt “uncomfortable” about being “privileged” as White native teachers of English yet “inadequate” and “monolingual” at the same time. They also felt burdened as “native teachers of English” when others thought they had “the miracle and abilities to improve students’ English regardless.” This burden escalated when they felt they had “failed to deliver because their students did not learn as much as they wanted them to” (John). Negative teaching evaluation and lack of engagement and interest from their students also lowered their self-esteem and challenged their native-speaker status. They had to endure this emotion(al) labor in silence and found it “difficult to share with anyone.” They felt it was “unfair” that they did not create the situation but were brought into the existing system and pushed to run along without being asked for “feedback, inputs or reflections.” They felt they were “left alone” and wondered if this was because they were “native teachers of English” that would somehow “make others nervous and avoid them.” Participating in this study gave them the opportunity to speak out loud what they had been enduring and experiencing, as they reported. Their emotions and emotion(al) labor had been unnoticed and unacknowledged by students, Saudi and Arab teachers, and their own institution for all those years teaching in the program.

Putting the teachers’ emotions in perspective and in their specific circumstances enables us to question the dominant discourse on White/Western native teachers of English which largely depicts them as being unqualified, inexperienced, and lacking knowledge, and who can get away with their native speaker status (Mahboob and Golden, 2013; Stanley, 2013). Here comes Benesch’s (2019, 2020) reminder to engage emotion labor alongside critical examination of the associated prejudice, power, and discourse. The teachers’ complex multi-layered emotions resulted from many factors, among which are established discourses surrounding the cultural politics of English and English language teaching and the debates on native–nonnative teachers of English (Fang and Widodo, 2020; Holliday, 2005; Pennycook, 1998; Stewart, 2020; Wolff and De Costa, 2017). What we highlight more in this article are the contradictory connotations underlying privilege and how privilege is consumed, resisted, and internalized alongside prejudice, discourse, power dynamics, and sociopolitical factors.

At one level, these teachers’ emotions and emotion(al) labor remind us of Kelley’s (this Special Issue) complex account as a White male American scholar of Asian Studies, in which he acknowledges “it was politically wiser . . . for a white male to predict his gradual extinction from the field and to declare that Asian Studies would soon be the domain of ‘heritage students,’ the children of immigrants” (Kelley, 2020). Kelley’s observation echoes much existing scholarship in TESOL, in which it is rare to find studies that put White native speakers at the center of inquiries without also attributing negative attributes to them and reminding them that they are on the wrong side. Indeed, Rivers (2017: 74) forcefully argues “the ideological conceptualization of native-speakerism allows only those identifying as ‘non-native speakers’ access to the desirable status of victim and its accompanying discourse of moral righteousness.” Building on his long-established scholarship on native speakers of English, Rivers provocatively maintains that the field of TESOL has betrayed native speaker teaching professionals. Rivers, hence, argues that this is a matter of injustice.

That the teacher participants’ felt injustice for predominantly being seen as White/Western native speakers of English shows how complex emotions and emotion(al) labor could easily be overlooked and simultaneously consumed by discourses and representation (Ahmed, 2004), particularly those about so-called privileged individuals/groups/populations (Phan, 2014, 2017). This tendency is in and of itself a matter of injustice stemming from undermined emotion(al) labor, which corresponds to and expands Benesch’s (2020) theorization of emotion labor as discourse of injustice/unfairness.

At another level, the participants’ emotions and their nuanced consumption and resentment of this very discourse of privilege bring to the fore the entanglements of multiple related discourses underlying White, male, native-speakerism, and the on-going debates between the pros and cons of native and non-native teachers of English in the sphere of education and TESOL more specifically. These teachers’ affective practice (Wetherell, 2015) sits well with their social inter-personal voices (Phan and Bao, 2019), as they are internalized, consumed, displayed, performed, and rationalized.

Emotion(al) labor in response to social, religious, and cultural difference

Islam is the only religion allowed in Saudi Arabia, and the country is generally known for its conservative tribal culture, although it is gradually opening up. International teachers are to respect that Saudi learners uphold the Islamic faith, values, and customs (Alrahaili, 2018; Khafaji, 2004; Ministry of Education, 1970). The average Saudi EFL learner with an academic background and learning style particular to the Saudi cultural, religious, and educational settings often finds it difficult to respond to the varied teaching styles and pedagogies of language teachers coming from Western and other non-Arab countries (Bataineh and Reshidi, 2017; Richardson, 2004). In reality, many Saudi learners might find foreign traditions contradictory to the teachings of Islam (Ozog, 1989). The situation can be worse when employers and recruitment agencies in Saudi Arabia are inclined to hire TESOL professionals from English-speaking Western countries, believing that their native proficiency has a direct impact on the EFL learners’ motivation and learning progress (Akcan, 2016; Mahboob and Elyas, 2014). This belief, while benefiting native-English-speaking teachers, also creates pressures on their part as well as on other teachers including Saudi teachers and students. This emotion(al) labor tends to be overlooked in the existing literature, which places non-native-English-speaking teachers at the center of inquiry and projects them as those who are on the receiving end of native-speakerism (Alghofaili and Elyas, 2017; Park, 2017; Song and Park, 2019). As we show below, the teacher participants in our study—Westerners, native speakers of English, experienced, and qualified—also undergo their own emotion(al) labor, which is often unacknowledged by those around them and by scholarly work.

The participants revealed to Abdullah that they were conscious of their status as Christian, non-Muslim, and Western teachers. Likewise, they reported being aware of explicit and implicit expectations to respect local social, cultural, and religious norms and traditions. Hence, they carefully chose their content materials for the writing tasks and the examples they quoted in their lessons to avoid any unnecessary problems. The teachers also revealed they had been told by other colleagues that “very religious Saudi students would complain to the administration” if they considered any aspects of the teaching “confrontational or insensible to their religious and cultural beliefs.” When such incidents happen, “teaching and learning could be affected in unpleasant ways,” confirmed Abdullah.

More and more Saudi higher education institutions tend to adopt a ready-made, custom-designed curriculum and ready-made materials for testing and assessment purposes developed by international publishers for use in their English language programs. Such a curriculum often presents a limited coverage of and relevance to the dominant Saudi cultural and educational context (Moskovsky and Picard, 2018; Shah and Elyas, 2019). In language classrooms, culturally sensitive topics if not handled well may lead to negative teaching and learning experiences (Hyland, 2003; Shukri, 2014). Shukri (2014) discusses this issue in her review of the difficulties experienced by Saudi EFL learners in speaking about topics deemed appropriate in other cultural and social contexts such as those in Western societies. These difficulties stem from the religious and cultural affiliation of the Saudi learners. She argues that writing activities become even more difficult when students find writing topics alienating to their local cultural contexts. These topics include music, relationships, politics, and sex, and they are considered culturally sensitive. Writing and discussion topics should not contradict the conservative Islamic teachings which are explicitly taught and practiced in educational institutions across Saudi Arabia. Therefore, international/transnational EFL teachers should be aware of the repercussions of discussing them in the classroom and should be cognizant of cultural prohibitions to avoid references that are inconsiderate of the officially endorsed values (El-Araby, 1983; Zhang, 2004). As observed by Abdullah and shown below, the participants were aware of the cultural difference and interacted appropriately with the students.

I’m always aware of the fact that there are students who come from very religious backgrounds and they do not readily embrace Western cultures. There are students who love to talk about the West, they are quite open and liberal. However, I have to be careful as anything can go wrong and put me in trouble. This is a challenge, a cultural challenge no doubt, which affects the process of teaching, how I pick topics for writing essays and how I assess those writings. (Ian)

It’s never easy to teach in a place where students have a completely different culture to that of yours. I believe that students and teachers are both at a disadvantage. Understanding and appreciating each other’s cultures can have a very positive impact on learning and teaching. (Jonathan)

The teachers’ emotion(al) labor in recognizing social, cultural, and religious difference and in making conscious efforts to avoid conflicts and misunderstanding is detected in the data above. It is also displayed in their understanding of their own limitations. Likewise, their emotion(al) labor is extended to their recognition of students’ disadvantages being taught by foreign teachers. At the same time, the data also bring to the surface dichotomous emotional discourses underlying local Saudi society (very religious, conservative, closed) and Western values (open, liberal, appreciating diversity). This articulated difference carries the weight of deeply entrenched stereotypes and discourses surrounding the West and the rest in educational and transnational encounters (see Phan and Mohamad (2020) article in this Special Issue for detailed discussion). When teachers and students cannot engage each other in meaningful and in-depth conversations because of a language barrier, these discourses and stereotypes remain unchallenged.

The teachers also acknowledged that they felt uncomfortable and somewhat frustrated when they could not draw from their cultural knowledge and topics that they knew well so as to stimulate students’ thinking and writing, largely because of the students’ low language proficiency and their own reservations. Having to silence their core identity and familiar values so as to perform appropriately in their current workplace is an indicator of emotion(al) labor/discourse. Having to prove their ability to appreciate cultural difference and respond sensibly to students’ cultural values is, likewise, another form of emotion(al) labor.

Reflecting on the constraints expressed by the teacher participants, Abdullah offers his own account which illuminates the dilemma transnational teachers often experience:

For me, teaching and assessing writing requires a decent knowledge about the local culture and students’ interests. As a Western-trained Muslim teacher teaching in the US, I found it very challenging to discuss what I consider sensitive or taboo topics such as sexuality. I could not prevent it, and I could not discuss it because I had not thought I will ever discuss it with my students. How could I grade it and how could I improve a written argument on a topic I always avoided? My vision for my US students was different from the program vision and the students’ vision. I found it difficult to compromise my own beliefs while in a more open culture like the US. My dilemma was the same as the Western transnational teachers in Saudi Arabia. The only difference, an essential one, is that they deal with a very conservative context and I dealt with a more open one. (Abdullah, reflection)

Abdullah’s reflection points to the importance of paying careful attention to the particularity of context, place, and one’s specific situation in studying transnational encounters, as argued by other articles in this Special Issue. Abdullah’s dilemma did not get resolved, not because he did not have any say nor was he discouraged by the institution where he worked. Everything was open and free but he himself and the “ideology as lived and felt” within him and his “inter-individual consciousness” (Phan and Bao, 2019). Topics considered inappropriate to his religious beliefs were brought to him by his students whose assignments he had to grade and discuss. Yet he found himself unable to engage given the resistance and unwillingness from within. On the contrary, the transnational teachers working at Mannar University in Saudi Arabia did not have any say in the curriculum and writing assessment policy and practice. They were expected to be respectful and observant of their students’ religious and cultural values, while also having to refrain themselves from drawing on their own “Western” cultural repertoire as teaching resources. It seems these teachers had to shoulder a tremendous emotional burden because of the situation they were in.

The emotion labor these teachers have endured is partly a result of the double-standard dominant discourse associated with White native teachers of English, whereby the desirability associated with them being White and native-English-speaking is also coupled with the expectation of them to be good or even superior at teaching, as discussed earlier. Likewise, while the assumed desirability associated with Whiteness and English-speaking-nativeness works to the institution’s advantage in terms of marketization, appearance, and internationalization, it does not do justice to the teachers and students, particularly when they are not part of the decision-making process (Phan, 2017). When this happens, only a fragment of their transnational emotional capital is utilized, and how it is utilized is shaped by neoliberalism, the market, and dominant discourses on the cultural politics of English language teaching.

Emotion(al) labor and top-down policy

As explained earlier, Mannar University requires that all English language teachers strictly follow a prescribed exam-driven curriculum and assessment procedure. The participants also found this top-down policy and practice contradictory to their own pedagogical knowledge and their own aspirations to help students learn. When teachers do not have any say and have to follow the set curriculum and assessment prescriptions, students do not learn and enjoy learning, as they collectively confirmed in the interviews with Abdullah.

I must follow a pacing guide to teach the prescribed curriculum, even the page number. Of course, it comes from the top and we cannot have any objection to that. No enjoyment for me and for the students. (Shaun)

Assessment of writing skills should reflect learners’ improved performances which gives a sense of satisfaction to the students and teachers; however, I have never experienced any improvement or satisfaction. (Jonathan)

It’s the top-down bureaucratic leadership structures and the top-down policy that creates issues. Since we cannot access the testing unit or those in decision-making positions, it’s never easy to suggest improvements or changes. We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn. (Ian)

The participants reported that their teaching and assessment were confined to a pacing guide and restricted to fixed assessment rubrics provided from the top. They were not allowed to grade their students’ exam papers but were required to give them feedback and consultation on their grades given by other teachers. They were critical of this teaching and assessment practice and unanimously found it destructive to language teaching and learning, particularly writing skills. With their professional training, prior teaching experience, and knowledge of assessment, the teachers agreed that while writing assessment rubrics may assist with the development of writing skills if applied appropriately, they all opposed the way these rubrics were enforced at Mannar University. They described the writing assessment rubrics as being “inconsistent,” “invalid,” and “inappropriate,” which makes writing, assessment, and peer feedback practice “a joke,” “mechanical,” and “rather meaningless.” Yet the teachers are required to comply with the rules and are not supposed to express their disagreement or discontent, as Abdullah affirms from his insider knowledge working in Saudi Arabia.

The above situation has led to the teachers becoming the target of students’ frustration and uncooperativeness when it comes to teaching and assessment. Such attitudes from students created low self-esteem and self-doubt among the teachers, making them feel “unappreciated” even “more strongly” in their own classrooms and at work when they “were not supposed to express” their frustration and discontent.

Take Ian’s observed feedback session with students as an example. Ian admitted being frustrated with them for expressing their frustration with non-stop questions towards him although he was not the one grading their exam papers. He was also frustrated about them being unhappy with their grades and for not being able to understand his explanations of the “ridiculous rubrics.” He was also frustrated with himself for not being able to answer their questions and to get his points across. The language barrier between him and his students and the “ridiculous” assessment policy at Mannar made him suffer tremendously, as he revealed.

All through his interview with Abdullah, Jonathan was repeatedly sighing. He was frustrated with students memorizing their essays. He also seemed discouraged with what he perceived as “the ridiculousness of essays and topics.”

The feedback session was subdued, but the tension was still palpable in the room. Students seemed defeated about their grades given by another teacher and shrugged off poor performances. At the same time, Jonathan did the best he could to present the rubric and explain it although he seemed aware that his efforts were not reaching the students. After repeatedly prompting the students to ask about their grades, his efforts seemed to dwindle with the growing futility of the exercise. (Observation notes)

John was also frustrated with the prescribed curriculum and assessments in Saudi Arabian institutions in general and at Mannar university in particular. He felt those were “unfair to the teachers who were forced to use them.” For Jonathan, “the existing methods lack teachers’ voice and input.” He made it clear that “no assessment instrument can be effective unless it has the input and deliberation from the classroom teachers.” The participants also expressed that they were “concerned” about the students whose learning suffers from this whole problem, and whose “writing seems very shallow and lacks depth.” Shaun, for example, wondered if this was an indicator of how uncomfortable the students still were about their writing and assessment practice.

The teachers obviously felt a strong sense of injustice and unfairness towards them and towards their students. Their dissatisfaction, disillusion, and helplessness did not come from their lack of responsibility, care, and concerns. Instead, these came from their lack of power to negotiate and from the authority’s uncritical submission to standardization and assessment prescriptions. The authority seemed “far away minding its own business” and teachers and students were left struggling, knowing there would not be anyone out there listening to them or wanting to fix the problem. Teachers and students were both powerless, although the mandatory feedback-giving practice gave a false impression of fairness and democratic participation. Benesch’s (2020) conceptualization of emotion labor as discourse of injustice and discourse of unfairness speaks powerfully in the situation reported by the teachers that we have discussed thus far.

However, unlike the English language instructors in Benesch’s (2020) study who expressed a sense of ambivalence (discourse of inevitability) when it comes to standardized testing, the participants in our study were consistent with their criticisms and disapproval of it and of the rigid assessment rubrics they all had to follow. For them, these rubrics “make little sense,” “have serious issues,” and “are there to help students pass the writing tests and not to assess their writing ability.” Basically, the rubrics serve as the safeguard of the university’s top leadership instead of serving students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. The challenges international teachers face multiply when they hardly receive support from the institution, particularly in ways that would allow them to have inputs in the curriculum and assessment practice to feel worthy of being a teacher and to help students learn knowledge and skills beyond testing. The emotion labor, echoing Benesch (2020), that these international TESOL teachers endure is in many ways unnoticed.

The social and cultural context of Mannar University seems inherently problematic and embeds injustice instead of promoting equality, communication, and academic freedom—the values that have been advocated in education, applied linguistics, and language education for decades (Benesch, 2020; Lynch, 2001; Shohamy, 1997). These values are what Ian, John, Jonathan, and Shaun upheld and put into practice in their prior teaching back home. These values were also essential in the educational and professional training they had received, as they shared with Abdullah. Their desirable capital appeared to receive little appreciation and recognition in their current workplace, and instead their frustration and disillusion—often perceived as negative emotions—tended to dominate their experience at Mannar.

Being caught in between the institution and students, these teachers are likely to receive criticisms from both sides, whereby their “monolingual,” “Western native-English-speaking,” and “Christian” identities could be blamed and negatively projected, as Abdullah observed. This problem, as we argue, takes away the teacher’s agency while making the institution free from responsibility and accountability; and hence change is not seen as necessary. This form of emotion(al) labor is evident in the teachers’ resistance, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and disillusion, all of which speak strongly to Benesch’s (2020) advocacy for recognizing teachers’ emotion and emotion labor as being discursive and involving power, exclusion, and injustice issues.

The teacher participants’ frustration about and dissatisfaction with the situation resulted from their strong sense of care, responsibility, and desire to make change through teaching, assessment, and policy intervention. Their emotional capital, nevertheless, had hardly been recognized by their students and the institutions, and even by Saudi teachers like Abdullah. Collecting the data for this study has challenged his own prejudice and stereotypes about native teachers of English. Abdullah admitted that he had been biased by the abundant literature condemning this group of teachers and by the general jealousy among local teachers and TESOL critics for the high salaries their government and institutions pay native teachers. Indeed, deeply rooted and widely circulated discourses such as the ones Abdullah refers to can mask our understanding of “the powerful” and prevent us from revisiting our own (pre)assumptions of certain groups in society, and therefore perpetuating injustice (Rivers, 2017). Making explicit and critically examining these discourses help uncover layers of nuances and biases towards native teachers of English that have long been ignored. The relatability of discourse, prejudice, bias, and reflection (Phan and Bao, 2019; Wetherell, 2015) offers useful analytical lenses, as we show in this study.

Abdullah’s reflection presented below in response to the above findings offers insights into how teachers could adapt to difference, but shows that the extent to which such adaptation could succeed and is enabled depends hugely on the specific social, cultural, educational, and ideological outlook of the context and those involved. Abdullah also acknowledged that while he was hopeful to see many changes taking place in Saudi higher education, he felt helpless about the system’s obsession with exam-driven policy and practice. He also showed much sympathy with the teacher participants, feeling that they all were on the same wavelength.

While teaching in the US, I also had to abide by prescribed writing assessment tools in the US, but those assessment tools were not exam-driven like the ones in Saudi Arabia. I came to understand that prescribed assessment tools are not always bad if they are assigned properly. I understand Western transnational teachers’ frustration in dealing with only exams, rigid rubrics, and not having a voice in writing assessment design. As a Saudi writing assessment educator who was trained in the West, I too have no power to change the exam-driven context. Therefore, this reality should be made upfront to all new international teachers brought here. These teachers need a thorough induction into the Saudi context. These teachers may bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience, but they have no place to show [that]. I’m exhausted but the long-lasting problem is worth fighting against. (Abdullah, reflection)

Abdullah demonstrated his emotion capital and emotion(al) labor through relativizing institutional demands and self-positioning as an insider in relation to institutional constraints. At the same time, his acknowledgment of the problem, his empathy with the expatriate teachers, and his strategic investment in particular forms of pedagogical labor are all manifestations of different kinds of emotion(al) labor. In the midst of all of this, the reality that Abdullah and other teachers face is their lack of power to negotiate despite their expressed strong agency to do so. The struggle to come to terms with accepting their absence of power to negotiate is another emotion discourse that teachers are subjected to.

In another reflection presented below on his teaching in the US, Abdullah also showed his emotion(al) labor in recognizing differences in expectations between students and teachers as a potential source of conflict. His painful adaption to the teaching situation in his Saudi university is another display of emotion(al) labor. It corresponds to the insider–outsider, local–global, Global North–Global South emotion(al) discourses which are felt, consumed, resented, encountered, and put up with by many transnationally trained scholars/academics/teachers discussed in this Special Issue (see Karakas, 2020; Nonaka, 2020; Phan and Mohamad, 2020; Phung, 2020; Windle, 2020).

My American students wanted to learn how to develop their critical thinking through their writing as opposed to focusing simply on the structure of a paragraph or how to develop an acceptable essay, and I found it difficult to offer that on each writing assignment because I tended to focus too long on assessing low order skills in writing. They wanted feedback on their ideas and how to further develop their argument. Now that I have returned to Saudi Arabia to teach EFL students, I could relate to the dilemma and experiences shared by Shaun, Ian, John, and Jonathan. Surely, I know my home context, but my teaching and assessing writing had changed. I struggled with neglecting all the knowledge and experience of teaching and assessing writing in the US that I had gained; and now I have had to, once again, become accustomed to assessing basic subskills of writing again. So even with much teaching experience, transnational teachers never find it easy to attend to students’ basic language needs, assess their writing using fixed rubrics and have no say in how assessment is done, and at the same time compromise their teaching beliefs. (Abdullah, reflection)

Further thoughts and reflections

As acknowledged by Bigelow (2019: 515), the past few years have seen “the exciting and ever-present realm of emotion (or affect) in the research and practice of language teaching and learning.” Bigelow has also observed that

the examination and understanding of teachers’ emotions has expanded considerably through layered, critical, and poststructural approaches to unpacking emotions which are carefully situated and recognize the many ways power can regulate emotion in different contexts. (2019: 515)

In our study, we document how transnationally trained TESOL teachers’ certain emotions and emotion(al) labor could multiply through a mixture of all-at-once undesirable factors: lack of interest and negative attitudes towards foreign language writing among EFL students with weak language skills and basics of grammar, the difficulties faced by expatriate teachers employed to teach and assess writing performance by this group of learners (Arnold, 2018; Doushaq, 1986; Ezza, 2017; Ghalib and Al-Hattami, 2015; Hyland, 2003; Shukri, 2014), social and cultural difference, and the requirement to strictly follow the institution’s prescribed curriculum and assessment policy and practice without any opportunities for teachers to give feedback and raise concerns. Existing literature, however, in attempts to admirably empower nonnative teachers of English and to counter native-speakerism and its underlying hegemonic discourses, has tended to overlook the varying affects experienced and practiced by these native teachers. It has also unintentionally perpetuated a discourse that native teachers of English are negligent of students’ needs and unaware of cultural difference. At least the many native teachers of English in Phan (2014, 2017) and Phan and Barnawi (forthcoming) and in this current study do not fall into that category. Having tried to articulate difficult emotions caused by this strong prejudice against them, these teachers show us the importance of approaching emotion(al) labor as discourse and as practice of intertwined affects (Ahmed, 2004; Benesch, 2019, 2020; Wetherell, 2015). Importantly, this approach enables researchers to understand how seemingly privileged individuals and groups display their own troubled emotions that are conditioned by their assumed powerful yet prejudiced status. In this process, we also recognize their unaddressed emotional capital (Al-deen and Windle, 2016) and their ideology as lived and felt (Phan and Bao, 2019).

Our study also signifies the importance for international teachers to learn Arabic, understand local Saudi culture, and show respect to Islamic values; but this could also present a problem when non-Muslim international teachers feel they have to distance themselves from their own knowledge and cultural repertoire in teaching. If Saudi universities aim to continue to recruit TESOL professionals from outside the Saudi context, creating a mutually respectful and inclusive platform is important to prepare these transnational teachers for their fulfilling teaching that could enable more effective learning among Saudi EFL learners. Their transnational experiences and knowledge should be recognized as resources, not threats to local values and religion, particularly when these teachers showcase their cultural sensibilities and willingness to adapt. Put differently, this very emotion(al) labor and emotional capital ought to be appreciated.

The findings also indicate that these Western transnational teachers have encountered power shifts at several levels. When they are in the EFL context to teach English as native speakers, they become aware of their inability to communicate with and offer additional support to their Arabic-speaking students, whose weak linguistic knowledge adds another layer of difficulty to their teaching and writing assessment activities. Moreover, these teachers find the rubrics and assessment tools imposed by university authorities ineffective due to their lack of consistency and validity. This bureaucratic structure makes the transnational teachers aware of their own pedagogical restrictions in implementing any assessment tools they find effective. Experiencing such a power shift while in an unfamiliar cultural and social setting can affect these teachers’ self-esteem and professional confidence—the kind of emotion labor that ought to result in institutional change and support. Therefore, this study recommends that top management involve teachers in the (re)development of the curriculum including designing assessment activities and rubrics that would help them grade the scripts in an objective manner as well as to help students see their learning progress. This process would also help build a community of transnational professionals who can rely on one another for support and ideas, which would benefit the institution as a whole. This is the activism transformation that Benesch (2020) calls for in studying and mobilizing teachers’ emotion labor.

We would like to end the article with another reflection from Abdullah to show his moral support for the teacher participants and to show his critical engagement with his and the participants’ emotion(al) labor, which, as he revealed, is “Worse, when you have to cope with it in isolation.”

Both cross-cultural similarities and key differences existed between the four transnational teachers in the Saudi context and my experience as a transnational teacher in the US. All of us had to cope with a prescribed curriculum and unfamiliar assessment tools. Even more salient was the cultural contexts we found ourselves in. While I spent hours educating myself on pop culture in a more open society, the teachers in the Saudi context adapted to a conservative, religious society. Each of us took it upon ourselves to adjust to unfamiliar cultural and societal circumstances while trying hard not to compromise our core values and beliefs. The respective education systems reflected this as well. On the surface Saudi students tend to be more submissive and typically accept grades without objection, but many American students challenge their teachers. Indeed, for the American students, revisions on their papers became a negotiation. However, while the transnational teachers in Saudi Arabia could relate to and count on one another if they wished for professional and emotional support, I did not have a transnational teachers’ community to share my struggles with and to learn from. I was on my own in my teaching journey because I had issues that were dissimilar from my fellow composition teachers. I always wanted to find that sense of belonging because I wanted to prove to everyone that I was up to the job that I was assigned to do. This critical ethnographic study demonstrates a similar desire among the transnational EFL teachers at Mannar University. (Abdullah, reflection)

We have treated our research participants’ emotion and emotion(al) labor with care, complexity, and ethical considerations. Abdullah’s own emotion and emotion(al) labor play an important role in how he relates to the experiences of the teacher participants. We have incorporated Abdullah’s reflections in this article to shed light on how research studies of this nature could inspire dialogues with the self and conversations among researchers for support and for solidarity beyond constructed boundaries of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. Through engaging with these dialogues and conversations, often hidden nuances of emotion(al) labor in transnational mobilities could be revealed and hence could push scholarly discussion forward.