An Investigation Into Job Burnout Of English Teachers In Secondary School

Job burnout has been a hot area of research among foreign and domestic scholars for the past years and there are many excellent achievements in this research aspect.On the whole,researchers have explored teachers' job burnout situation and found adverse impacts of burnout on teachers,students and entire education.This kind of research has practical significance,because teachers play an important role in education.Based on the existing literature of teacher burnout,the present study aimed to explore the status quo of secondary school English teachers and explored the effects of some important variables on English teacher burnout.It also attempted to offer some suggestions for teachers and education administrative,so as to relieve English teachers' job burnout syndrome.The participants in this study were 100 secondary school English teachers from16 public schools in Jiangxi.The age of the teachers ranged from 23 to 52.A questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were used to gain relevant data in this study.The questionnaire was Maslach's(1981)Burnout Inventory-Educators Survey(MBI-ES),which was composed of three dimensions: emotional exhaustion,depersonalization and personal accomplishment.And the interview questions were designed in three dimensions to find out some hidden causes leading to the teachers' burnout.The questionnaire data from this study were analyzed by the SPSS Version17.0.The study produced a number of results related to the teachers' burnout.First,the secondary school English teachers in this study experienced a moderate overall burnout level,with high emotional exhaustion,low-moderate depersonalization and moderate-high personal accomplishment.Secondly,gender,as a very important demographic variable,significantly influenced the secondary school English teachers' burnout.For the overall burnout level,the female teachers had significantly higher burnout scores than the male teachers.Also,the female teachers had significantly higher emotional exhaustion level than the male teachers.Nonetheless,in depersonalization and personal accomplishment categories,there was no significant difference between the male and female English teachers.Thirdly,years of teaching experience had an effect on teachers' job burnout.The teachers who had a longerteaching experience had significantly lower burnout level than the teachers who had taught for only a few years.Compared with the more experienced English teachers,less experienced English teachers had higher emotional exhaustion,depersonalization and lower personal accomplishment.Fourthly,the urban English teachers had significantly lower burnout level than the rural English teachers.As for emotional exhaustion and depersonalization categories,English teachers in rural schools had significantly higher scores than the English teachers in urban schools.Finally,the rural English teachers had significantly lower personal accomplishment scores than urban English teachers.On the basis of the findings summarized above,this study could propose some recommendations to solve English teachers' burnout.First,our government should try every means to elevate English teachers' status and improve teachers' economic conditions.Next,teachers themselves should learn to regulate their own emotion and improve their professional development.In addition,teachers should build interaction between students and parents so as to reduce their job burnout.By doing these,teachers can not only create an appealing working environment for themselves,but also make the teaching more effective and enhance their teaching efficiency.