Teaching is often regarded as a profession with a high probability of job burnout. Research has shown a close relationship between teachers’ motivation and their burnout, but it has not been closely explored among EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers in Chinese contexts. Considering the large number of college English teachers in Chinese universities and recent changes in their role, the study explores the relationship between their motivation and burnout, as well as the factors that affect teacher burnout among Chinese college English teachers. For this purpose, a total of 261 college English teachers from ten Chinese universities participated in the survey. Among them, 68 teachers submitted their narratives on teacher burnout using the narrative frame. The results showed that high mastery and relational goals and a low level of work avoidance goals contributed to higher motivation and less teacher burnout. The demand for research, lack of autonomy, and guanxi-based practices influenced Chinese teachers’ burnout. The results show that teacher burnout is highly context-dependent and affected by the organizational structure and cultural practices. An organizational support needs to be provided for teachers to maintain their mastery goal orientations and increase their autonomy as professional teachers.

As emphasis has increased on English as an international language and on the globalized image of universities, the number of native English speaker teachers (NETs) has also increased in Korean universities. From the poststructuralist view, teacher identity is constructed through participation in valued activities of the community of practice, and it is not fixed but constantly negotiated through the interaction of the context (Wenger, 1998). While previous studies focused on nonnative English speaker teachers’ identity construction, little attention has been paid to NETs in the EFL context. Considering the need to explore teacher identity from recent theoretical perspectives, the present study investigates how NETs negotiate conflicting identities and construct their teacher identities in the Korean university context. The findings show the NETs constructed multiple identities of an English educator, a collaborative volunteer, a non-tenured instructor, and a cultural and linguistic outsider, and they legitimize their professor identity through their participation in the present and imagined community of competent teachers. The findings support the claim that teacher identity is embedded in the sociocultural context that interacts with the individual agency in making sense of who they are. Implications and suggestions of the study are addressed based on the findings.

The study explores the identity construction of non-regular English conversation teachers (non-RECTs) in an elementary and a middle school in Korea. Drawing on positioning theory and the notion of community of practice, the study illustrates how non-RECTs resist, modify, and reconstruct their teacher identity through positioning themselves and others, and different modes of participation in the school contexts. It is a three-year longitudinal study with two female non-RECTs. The primary data gathered through interviews and informal talks, documents, and e-mails were also included for triangulation purposes. The findings suggest that the non-RECTs self-positioned themselves as qualified teachers who can effectively implement communicative language teaching into the classroom, but their positioning was challenged and rejected by regular teachers. The participants resisted their marginalized positions as temporary instructors and claimed their legitimacy by establishing themselves as positive contributors to the communicative curriculum. The findings show the non-RECTs’ identity construction is a struggle between the different views on legitimacy and a negotiation among multiple and conflicting identities.

Recent L2 motivation research has paid attention to the dynamic nature of motivation and to the process of motivational changes in L2 learning. While studies have mostly focused on the factors positively influencing L2 motivation, relatively little research has been conducted on the factors that influence learner demotivation. In this light, the study examined the factors affecting Korean college students’ demotivation and their reaction to demotivation by drawing on the notions of ideal L2 self and ought-to L2 self in Dörnyei (2005, 2009). Based on interviews with twenty-nine Korean college students, three factors were identified as demotivating factors: lack of meaningful purpose, lack of improvement and success experiences, and lack of self-determination. It was noted that the conflict between the students’ desire to use English for communication and the immediate need to gain good scores on standardized tests was the main source of learner demotivation. However, the students with a strong ideal L2 self were more successful in setting personalized goals and participating in personally meaningful activities when demotivating factors were present. The findings indicate the importance of learners’ ability to visualize their ideal L2 self in overcoming demotivation and remotivating themselves.

The present study investigated native speaker teachers’ beliefs about learning and teaching English in the Korean university setting. Despite the great influx of native speaker teachers into the Korean English education system, relatively little research has been carried out on teachers’ perspectives on learning and teaching. Considering the significant impact of teachers’ beliefs in the classroom, this study investigated the sources of teachers’ beliefs, their beliefs about learning and teaching, and their beliefs about teacher roles in the second language classroom. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with eight native English speakers who were teaching at the same university. The findings showed that the teachers believed students’ active participation was the key to successful second language learning. It was shown that the teachers’ beliefs were closely associated with their prior learning experiences and that differences in the learning experiences between the teacher and students may cause difficulty in the second language classroom. These findings suggest the importance of teachers’ awareness of students’ learning experiences and the need to negotiate within the given teaching context without completely giving up teachers’ own beliefs about learning and teaching a second language.