Accounting for Iranian EFL Teachers' Burnout: Educational Beliefs and Teacher Self-Disclosure in Focus

Abstract

Teaching is considered a high-risk profession for suffering from burnout syndrome. Burnout syndrome not only affects the person who suffers from it, but also everyone around them, e.g., family, friends, co-workers, students and parents. The main purpose of this study was to find the correlates of burnout in EFL teachers. Thus, it was conducted to investigate any probable relationship between Iranian EFL teachers’ educational belief and their tendency to self-disclose with their likelihood of suffering from burnout. The research instruments were The Teacher Self-Disclosure Scale (Cayanus and Martin, 2008), Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI-ES) (Maslach and Jackson, 1981), and Teachers' Educational Belief Questionnaire (Chan Elliot, 2004). The participants were 98 EFL teachers selected from 25 private language schools in Shiraz, Iran. Descriptive statistics, Cronbach Alpha coefficients, and Person Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient were used to answer this research questions. Analyzing the data collected through the questionnaires indicated that there was a positive correlation between some dimensions of teacher burnout and those of teachers’ constructive or traditional beliefs. Thus, ‘lack of personal achievement’ and ‘constructive beliefs’, ‘emotional exhaustion’ and ‘depersonalization’ and teachers’ traditional beliefs were positively correlated. Conversely, a negative correlation was identified between ‘lack of personal achievement’ and teachers’ traditional beliefs. Likewise, ‘emotional exhaustion’ and ‘depersonalization’ on the burnout scale were correlated with teachers’ constructive beliefs.  However, no significant correlation was observed between teachers’ neutral beliefs and any dimensions of the burnout scale. Moreover, teacher self-disclosure quantity and negativity were found to be corelated with ‘emotional exhaustion’ and ‘depersonalization’ on the burnout scale.