On the Relationship Between EFL Teachers’ Burnout and Their Affective Construct

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between teachers' burnout and their affective construct. For this purpose, 384 ELT teachers in different language institutes and schools in Mashhad participated in this study. There were both male (159) and female (225) teachers with different experiences and in different ages. Two instruments were given to teachers and they were asked to complete and give them back to the researcher. One of the instruments was Maslach (1993) that is teachers' burnout and comprises 22 items with different subcategories including emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal achievement. The other instrument was the affective construct questionnaire developed by Ghaemi (2012) for the context of Iran. After gathering the questionnaires, the researcher used Pearson correlation as the statistical test to find out the relationship between the variables in this study. The results of the analysis showed that there is a significant correlation between teachers' burnout and one of the components of affective construct, i.e. social composite domain. The other component of affective construct was a social focused domain. Regarding this component, the researcher found a correlation of (0.59) with teachers' burnout. The correlation between individual composite domain and teachers' burnout showed a significant and strong (0.73) result. The last component of teachers' effective constructed which was significantly correlated with burnout was an individually focused domain (.71) correlation.