Affective aspects in the language classroom: Focus on the teacher

It is nearly thirty years now that students’ language learning processes have been thoroughly investigated. An incredible number of articles, essays and books deal with issues related to how a foreign language is acquired, needs to be taught, practiced and carried out within communicative exchanges in formal learning environments. New methods, approaches and solutions are offered, tried out and investigated and tools, strategies and techniques aiming at facilitating the language learning process are proposed. A minor focus is given to language teachers, analyses on their efforts to keep up with language-related methodological changes, parents’ perspectives, school pedagogical frames, time constraints, just to mention a few aspects of the scenario, do not fill up the contemporary academic production. As a consequence of this situation, the perception one gets in the literature on the topic is unbalanced: investigations on the roles of classroom interactants result skewed with a strong emphasis on students, rather than on teachers. Even within humanistic analyses, the focus remains directed towards students’ needs, acquisition frames and modalities: little is said about teachers. How do they feel? How can they cope with the frequent novelties in the field? Do affective/humanist approaches turn out to be more humane for them too? The present paper directs its focus on language teachers and on what can be done in order to offer them a more humane teaching frame within an effective affective approach to language learning.