VIETTESOL INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION 2025

This study investigates how socio-cultural factors shape the emotional experiences of Vietnamese tertiary EFL teachers, with a focus on their lifelong engagement with English, particularly in oral communication. Employing a qualitatively-driven mixed methods design, the research involved two phases: initial and exploratory questionnaires, followed by semi-structured interviews and reflective journals. The quantitative data provided an overview of emotional patterns over time, while the qualitative findings offered deeper insight into how emotions were shaped and reshaped across various social and cultural contexts. The results reveal that teachers’ emotional experiences in speaking English were not isolated or purely individual, but deeply embedded in broader socio-cultural influences throughout different stages of their lives. These included early exposure to English in the family, language learning experiences in secondary and tertiary education, professional classroom practice, and participation in academic settings such as conferences. Across all these contexts, emotions were found to be fluid, evolving, and constructed through ongoing interactions with institutional expectations, cultural values, and interpersonal dynamics. The study highlights the need to view teacher emotions as socially and contextually grounded, and it calls for teacher education programs to provide more culturally responsive and emotionally supportive training that equips educators to navigate the emotional demands of English oral communication across diverse professional and learning environments.