"Teacher, Man Mitoonam horizontal ellipsis ?": Translanguaging and English Language Teacher Emotion Labor

Theory and research on translanguaging have increasingly grown in the past decades. However, the scope of research on how teachers make sense of translanguaging is limited, particularly how they emotionally respond to a translanguaging pedagogy. The present study addressed this gap by examining eight Iranian English-L2 teachers' translanguaging-inflected emotion labor in a private language school. Data were collected from classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, and narrative frames. Data analyses showed that the teachers' translanguaging practice and emotion labor interacted in three dimensions: (1) translanguaging as proficiency-inflected emotion work, (2) translanguaging as a face-saving emotional undertaking, and (3) translanguaging as a multifaceted emotion-bearing policy. The study shows that the teachers engaged in changing, masking, and expressing their emotions, which created clashes in and affordances for their internal sense-making and external manifestations of emotions relative to their translanguaging practices. We provide implications for teacher educators, policymakers, and teachers regarding how to appropriate translanguaging based on contextual discourses in order to positively contribute to teachers' emotional career.