چکیده:
In order to be autonomous, teachers should enjoy teaching and be satisfied with their teaching. Teacher autonomy, therefore, may be related to teacher burnout and job satisfaction. The present study investigated the relationship between job satisfaction, teacher burnout, and teacher autonomy. Two hundred and seven language teachers at language institutes in Karaj and Tehran were given three questionnaires to complete. Convenience sampling was used to select language teachers in this study, and IBM SPSS (version 22) was used to analyze the data. Three non-parametric statistical tests were used to analyze the collected data. According to the findings of this study, job satisfaction had a weak negative relationship with teacher burnout, and teacher autonomy correlated negatively with job satisfaction. Moreover, no relationship between teacher autonomy and teacher burnout was found. Although the findings should be interpreted with care because of sample size, the paper ends with implications for language teachers and policy makers.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Considering the prominent role language teachers play in the field of language teaching, several scholars (Borg, Riding, & Falzon, 1991; Chan, 2004) have studied teachers’ feelings and emotions.
Skaalvik and Skaalvik (2009) affirmed that the causes of stress may include lack of support from the school leadership, conflicts in cooperating with colleagues, increased workload, students with behavioral problems, problem in the parent–teacher relationship, and lack of “autonomy”, which draws our attention to another major point of the present study- teacher autonomy (Chan, Wan & Kuok, 2014; Koustelios & Tsigilis, 2005; Platsidou, 2010).
Teacher autonomy is a right given to the teachers to decide and take responsibilities about selecting, or designing materials and strategies for their classrooms and to evaluate the outcomes and cooperate in finding solutions for the teaching problems in schools (Akbarpour-Tehrani & Wan Mansor, 2012).
Recently, Javadi (2014) examined the relationship between feeling of burnout and teacher autonomy, as a professional development construct, among 143 EFL teachers in different private language teaching institutes in Iran.
Data were collected using Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996) and Teaching Autonomy Scale developed by Pines and Hall (1993).
A possible explanation for no relationship between teacher burnout and teacher autonomy is that burnout takes plenty of time to develop (Friesen, Prokop, & Sarros, 1988) and since 96 participants (almost a half) of the present research were teachers with 1 to 5 years of teaching experience, they might not have had a clear understanding of the concept of burnout or even experienced it.