VietTESOL International Convention 2026

This qualitative interview study examines how linguistic insecurity shapes the emotional experiences and professional identities of nine high school EFL teachers in Vietnam’s Central Highlands amid growing pressure to teach English through English. Situated in a resource-constrained region where many students are from ethnic minority communities and have limited exposure to English outside the classroom, the study explores how teachers navigate expectations for communicative language teaching in large and linguistically diverse classes. Drawing on a poststructural-discursive perspective on emotion, the study approaches teacher anxiety not as an individual weakness, but as a response to reform-driven expectations surrounding English-medium instruction. Data were generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analyzed using Song’s framework of sacred, cover, and secret stories alongside Benesch’s concepts of feeling rules and emotion labor. Findings indicate that teachers’ insecurity centered less on general English proficiency than on the demands of using English spontaneously and continuously in classroom interaction. Participants described anxiety about giving unscripted explanations, responding to unexpected student questions, sustaining English-medium interaction, and maintaining professional authority while speaking English. To manage these pressures, many relied on scripted classroom language, reduced open-ended interaction, switched strategically to Vietnamese, and narrowed communicative activities that might expose perceived linguistic limitations. The study argues that teachers’ emotion labor emerges from the mismatch between national reform expectations and the realities of under-resourced provincial classrooms. It calls for teacher development policies that move beyond general proficiency benchmarks and address the emotional and interactional demands of English-for-teaching in local school contexts.
Keywords: Emotion labor; linguistic insecurity; English-for-teaching; EFL teachers; communicative language teaching; Vietnam’s Central Highlands