Research On The Current Situation Of Senior Middle School English Teachers’ Burnout And Its Relationship With Social Support

According to Maslach, job burnout, also known as "job exhaustion", is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment that occurs among individuals who fail to respond effectively to the consistent work pressure in service industry. Social support refers to various help people get from the society or a kind of social behavior on how people support each other within a social support network, which has an important effect on social skills, work performance, physical and mental health of individuals. At present, the researches on the relationship between senior middle school teachers’burnout and social support are still developing. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to solve the four problems:1) What is the current situation of senior middle school English teachers’ burnout and social support?2) What’s the possible effect of demographic factors on teacher job burnout?3) Does social support have an influence on teacher job burnout? If it does, in which dimension and to what extent can it influence?4) What are the effects of different types and different sources of social support on teacher job burnout?This research aims to answer questions with the methods of questionnaires (analyzed by Statistic Package for Social Science-SPSS11.5) and individual interviews. The research analyzes the current situation of job burnout and social support of250English teachers from5senior middle schools in Yiwu with descriptive statistics, and does the demographic analysis on teacher job burnout and correlation analysis on teacher job burnout and social support; At the same time, the research discusses effects of different types and different sources of social support on teacher job burnout.The research findings are summarized as follo wings:1) senior middle school English teachers suffer from burnout, while their burnout is not very serious, which is consistent with the previous researches on the teachers’burnout.2) Demographic factors, such as age, marital status, degree of education, teaching experience, professional qualifications are all the influential factors on the job burnout of senior middle school English teachers. Teachers between30and40, teachers with5-9teaching experience, teachers with associate degree and married teachers, are prone to job burnout, while no significant differences are found in the aspects of gender, head teacher and grade level.3) Significant negative correlation is found between senior middle school English teachers’ burnout and social support. Teachers get the more social support, and they’ll experience the lower degree of job burnout.4) Each type of social support (objective social support, subjective social support, perceived social support) has an effect on teachers’burnout. What’s more, subjective social support has a most significant impact on all dimensions of burnout.5) The support from family, friends, students and leaders correlates significantly with teachers’ burnout while there are no significant differences between the support from colleagues and three dimensions of teacher job burnout.