Teaching satisfaction and resilience play important roles in the education field, but most research focuses on higher education, with few scholars studying their impact on language teaching within the context of middle school education. In this sense, this study employs a mixed-methods research design, selecting 375 Chinese middle school English teachers to investigate the roles of teaching satisfaction and resilience in the relationship between self-efficacy and teachers’ well-being. A structural equation modeling approach and NVivo were utilized to analyze quantitative data and qualitative data, respectively. Quantitative results reveal that both teaching satisfaction and resilience mediate the relationship between self-efficacy and teachers’ well-being. Qualitative interviews reveal that teaching satisfaction primarily enhances job commitment, reduces job stress, improves student relationships, and increases professional growth. Meanwhile, resilience plays a crucial role in stress management, positive adaptation, and emotional regulation. This research offers insightful implications for improving teachers’ well-being and contributes significantly to the broader discourse on foreign language teacher education.

This study examined the emotion labor of student teachers in Chinese secondary schools and explored how they negotiated and constructed their teacher identities, with Zembylas’ model of three levels of teacher emotions (intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup levels) as the analytical framework. The primary data was collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with three student teachers who served as interns for fifteen weeks. To ensure data triangulation, emotional diaries, student focus group interviews, classroom observations and relevant documents were also gathered as supplementary data. Findings revealed the inextricably interwoven relationship between teacher emotion labor and identity. Firstly, student teachers’ confusion about their identity emerged partly due to their student-teacher equal educational philosophy. Secondly, the prerequisite for natural expressions of emotions is the mutual trust among both parties. Lastly, self-reflections evoked by emotion labor could facilitate student teachers’ identity formation and transformation. The implications derived are significant for stakeholders in the field of teacher education.