Emotions in Teachers' Talk: A Case Study in Rural and Regional New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

This paper adds to the growing literature on the emotional aspects of teachers' work. It reports on the analysis of semi-structured interviews with 14 teachers located in rural and regional NSW. The interviews were conducted in-situ and addressed the teachers' biographies, professional trajectories, notions of 'good teachers' and rural pedagogies. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis was used to analyse the semi-structured interview transcripts, which form a corpus of almost 100,000 words. The Appraisal framework was used to structure the analysis, which focuses on unsolicited comments that address emotions, with particular attention to happiness. The findings demonstrated that the participants frequently animated their talk with unsolicited references to emotions and, whilst a range of emotions was referenced, the vast majority of references were to happiness.