A Study On Relationships Among Teacher Self-efficacy, Occupational Stress And Teacher Burnout In Professional Development Of Young Female College English Teachers

Teaching profession has been recognized as a career with intense and high pressure. Prolonged occupationalstress will contribute to teacher burnout, which will in turn affect teachers’ physical and psychological health,reduce the quality of education and hinder teachers’ professional development. Teachers’ positivity and initiativeplay a decisive role in the process of teacher professional development. Therefore, taking measures to preventand alleviate teacher burnout will stimulate teachers’ enthusiasm and initiative for teacher professionaldevelopment. With the deepening of college English teaching reform, college English teachers’ professionaldevelopment has gained much attention. Young female college English teachers account for a large proportionamong the college English teaching staffs. As an important component and reserved force of it, their qualityconstruction cannot be neglected. According to the social cognitive theory, teacher self-efficacy is considered tohave close and intrinsic link with both occupational stress and teacher burnout. Consequently, the present studyaims to investigate the following questions:1. What is the general situation of young female college Englishteachers’ self-efficacy, occupational stress and teacher burnout respectively?2. What is the relationship amongthe three variables?3. What implications can we get to prevent and alleviate teacher burnout to promote youngfemale college English teachers’ professional development?In order to answer the research questions above, this thesis took a sample of75young female collegeEnglish teachers whose age is≤35from four universities as the subjects. By adopting teacher self-efficacyquestionnaire, teacher occupational stress questionnaire and teacher burnout questionnaire, the present studyinvestigated the general situation of young female college English teachers’ self-efficacy, occupational stress andteacher burnout; distinguished the relationship among these variables based on the analysis of the valid dateobtained from these questionnaires by means of SPSS16.0. The results of this study are gained as follows:1. Young female college English teachers have high level of self-efficacy and occupational stress, but lowlevel of burnout and moderately high level of emotional exhaustion. The factors that contribute to theiroccupational stress are role responsibility, school management and teacher treatment, self survival anddevelopment, workload, students’ factor and interpersonal relationship in sequence.2. Teacher self-efficacy, occupational stress and teacher burnout are significantly correlated with each other.Teacher self-efficacy is negatively correlated with occupational stress and teacher burnout, while occupationalstress is positively correlated with teacher burnout. Interpersonal relationship and workload have significantlypositive prediction on teacher burnout, while general teaching efficacy has significantly negative prediction on teacher burnout. Teacher self-efficacy has moderating effect between occupational stress and teacher burnout.Teacher self-efficacy can help young female college English teachers to resist the negative effects brought byoccupational stress, and relieve the extent of teacher burnout.3. Based on the analysis above, some suggestions were put forward to prevent and relieve young femalecollege English teachers’ burnout to promote better teacher professional development from the aspect ofadministrators and young female college English teachers themselves.