The recent growth and sustainability in online education have led to a greater demand for language teachers to accept online teaching and a heightened focus on language teachers’ emotions in an online setting. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study attempted to investigate the relationship between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ acceptance of online teaching and their emotional labor in online teaching. A questionnaire was distributed to 338 EFL teachers working at 19 middle schools and 24 high schools in China, and 10 teachers were interviewed. Following a series of analyses of the data, a structural relationship model integrating acceptance of online teaching and online teaching emotional labor strategies was developed and tested. The results indicate that EFL teachers’ acceptance of online teaching significantly predicts three emotional labor strategies in online teaching. Specifically, EFL teachers’ acceptance of online teaching positively influences deep acting and expression of naturally felt emotions, while negatively affecting surface acting. The obtained results address important theoretical, methodological, and practical gaps by examining the interplay between acceptance of online teaching and emotional labor in the context of online language education, a dimension that previous studies have largely overlooked.

As acculturation research has become more interdisciplinary and dynamic over the last 20 years, it is necessary to explore its emerging trends. We collected 10,039 research articles on acculturation research from 2000 to 2020 from the Web of Science (WoS) database and utilized the CiteSpace tool to visualize emerging trends. During the data analysis, we extracted noun phrases from the abstracts of the retrieved articles to identify clusters, and the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) algorithm was used to generate cluster labels in the co-citation network. Based on the size of the clusters, the five largest clusters were chosen and analyzed: “Asian cultural value,” “Suicide attempt,” “Unhealthy behavior,” “Host country identification,” and “Emerging adulthood”. These findings may help researchers and scholars gain useful insight and explore topics related to the research trends in acculturation.