An Investigation Of The Stress Of Senior High School EFL Teachers In The New Situation

At present, teachers' stress is universal at an unprecedented degree around the world.In China, a lot of studies have shown that teachers in middle schools and universities are under stress. However, there is a lack of empirical data regarding senior high school EFL teachers' stress against the background of new educational reform on Entrance Examination of English for higher education and those EFL teachers in Shanxi Province in particular.To fill in the research gap, the study was to investigate the experiences of stress of senior high school EFL teachers in Shanxi Province in the new situation so as to offer some practical and specific suggestions to lessen teachers' stress and enhance China's educational reform development.To achieve the research purpose, a quantitative research was adopted with the use of a questionnaire survey. The whole research was divided into two steps. The first step was the questionnaire design, at which individual interviews were conducted with an intended purpose to decide the content of the questionnaire; the second step was a survey carried out by questionnaire. At this step, with the use of the convenient sampling method, a total number of 308 questionnaires were distributed among senior high school EFL teachers from different schools in Shanxi Province. The distribution and collection of the questionnaires lasted for three weeks, from March 1 to March 22 of 2016. In total, 285 valid questionnaires were obtained and analyzed.The analysis of questionnaire data revealed that 73% of senior high school EFL teachers in Shanxi Province were under high stress, deriving from eight stress sources:workload, students' stress, career development, school management, educational reform,enrollment and examination, interpersonal relationship and sociai stress. Besides, through conducting Independent Sample T tests with the help of SPSS 19.0, the author found that female EFL teachers were more stressed than male teachers in terms of school management,educational reform, enrollment and examination, as well as career development. Also, the result indicated that married EFL teachers were more stressed than unmarried EFL teachers.Moreover, it is found that EFL teachers in key middle schools were more stressed than those in average middle schools in terms of teachers' workload, while on students' stress,EFL teachers in average middle schools were more stressed than those in key middle schools.In addition, by conducting One-Way ANOVA, the author found that senior high school EFL teachers who had more than 20 years of teaching were more stressed than those whose years of teaching were less than 5 years in terms of workload, educational reform and overall stress, and those EFL teachers with 11-15 years of teaching were more stressed than those young teachers with less than 5 years in terms of workload. Also, the result further suggested that, in terms of workload, senior high school EFL teachers without such professional titles as junior,intermediate and senior titles were significantly less stressed than those teachers with those professional titles. Furthermore, regarding enrollment and examination factor, those senior high school EFL teachers from prefecture-level cities and counties were more stressed than those from middle schools located in the provincial capital city; on the overall stress, EFL teachers from the sampled middle schools in prefecture-level cities experienced more stress than those from the provincial capital.With the help of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the author in the thesis interpreted EFL teachers' stress and main sources of stress. Also, the relation between stress and various demographic variables was explored. Based on these results, it is suggested that some measures need to be taken in order to lessen EFL teachers' stress and improve EFL teachers' mental health.