English teaching as gendered care work

Drawing on data from ethnographic fieldwork at an English language school for young learners in South Korea, this article examines the relationship between emotional labour and gender in English language teaching (ELT). It takes note of how bilingual speakers’ emotional work was constructed as suitable for women and rendered invisible in their respective working contexts. The findings show that: 1) the job requires the female bilingual teachers to not only teach English but also engage in invisible, gendered childcare; and 2) amid the paradoxical situation in which bilingual teachers are expected to reproduce the ideology of native speakerism to be recognized as proficient English speakers, their anxiety about linguistic and cultural hybridity also deepened. The precarious labour conditions of female bilingual teachers in the school epitomise a broader trend in the contemporary South Korean ELT market, where female bilingual teachers’ emotional labour is naturalised in the name of caring.