The Relationship between EFL Reflective Teaching and Teachers’ Burnout

Teaching is considered to be a stressful career (Borg, 1990). People may encounter psychologicaland physical problems providing that their professions cause stressful situation. These problemsare coined as burnout (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001). It has been proved that colleagues’cooperation and reflective practices are the methods that teachers use for the improvement oftheir professions (Alger, 2006; Hendricks, 2009). The main purpose of this study was toinvestigate whether there is a significant relationship between EFL reflective teaching andteachers’ burnout, and whether reflective teaching can be predicted by the components ofburnout. The participants of this study were 198 experienced male and female teachers fromdifferent institutes in Tehran who were selected through convenient sampling. This study wasbased on a quantitative, cross-sectional design. The sample (n=198) consisted of both males(n=80) and females (n=118). The data was obtained from two questionnaires, a reflectiveteaching questionnaire and a burnout questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and Pearson productmoment correlation were conducted to analyze the obtained data. Correlations found significantrelationships between variables. Accordingly, teachers who reported no reflective teachingreported high levels of burn out. In addition, the results revealed that just two components ofburnout (i.e., personal accomplishment and emotional exhaustion) are the predictors ofreflective teaching not the third component (i.e., depersonalization). The study has implicationsfor EFL teachers, language learners, and syllabus designers.

کلیدواژه ها:

reflective teaching ، teacher burnout ، personal accomplishment ، emotional exhaustion ، depersonalization