A Case Study On Burnout Of English Teachers In Rural Junior Middle School

In recent years, influenced by many factors like relatively low wages, low social status and high working pressures, teacher burnout has become more and more serious,which is a big problem in education. Many teachers have low job satisfaction and lack enthusiasm so that they are unwilling to work with total dedication, which impact the improvement of the quality of education.With the trend of political and economic globalization, English, as an international language, has been widely used as a communicative tool. Therefore, people put more emphasis on English teaching. Under the influence of working pressure, subject feature of English and some social factors, English teachers' job burnout has become more serious, especially for some teachers in rural junior middle school. Compared to the English teaching in urban junior middle school, English teaching in rural junior school is not so good as it. It's also in the weak place compared to the other subjects. English teachers in rural junior middle school tend to use the old and traditional ways to teach English in class. The ways which lack creativity even make themselves feel grueling and tedious. They are puzzled about the value of their work and have low sense of individual achievement. Meanwhile, their teaching enthusiasm reduces and their burnout becomes serious.This study adopted case study method and the researcher selected six English teachers in a rural junior middle school called Shahu Middlle School as study subjects to survey the current situation of burnout in English teachers and explore the reasons for its existence through literature, MBI-ES, interviews and observation. The researcher used MBI-ES and interviews to investigate the job burnout of English teachers. Meanwhile,observation is used to record English teachers' work performance and their teaching results so that we can know whether teacher burnout has a negative influence on the quality of teaching. Then we can accordingly put forward the corresponding solutions.The research result shows that six English teachers in the case school suffer a moderate job burnout. Their emotional exhaustion and their depersonalization are very serious, but their sense of personal accomplishment is high. Teacher burnout is one of the important factors affecting the English teaching quality, and the poor teaching quality will also has negative impact on teacher burnout. There are four factors causing teacher burnout: school environment, language learning environment, teachers' vocational level,and teaching evaluating mechanism.According to the findings in this paper, some effective interventions can be taken to prevent and release burnout among rural teachers, which will promote teacher's physical and mental development and improve the quality of English teaching.