| It was Herbert Freudenberger, an American clinical psychologist, who first put forward the concept of job burnout in1974. It is believed that this phenomenon often appears in people-serving industries. Many researches at home and abroad find that teachers who are professional educators, have become the high risk group of burnout, and burnout is becoming a prominent world-wide problem in the field of education. Actually, burnout has posed an enormous threat to teachers’physical and mental health, teaching quality as well as the stability of teachers. There is no doubt that those teachers suffering from burnout always have less sympathy for their students, lower tolerance with classroom disruption, and less engagement in their teaching. Thus, teacher burnout would negatively affect on both teachers’teaching and students’learning.According to the literature at home and abroad, most of the researches focus on primary and elementary school teachers, there are very few studies focus on college teachers, especially on college English teachers. What’s more, the scholars in mainland China pay much attention to analyzing the situational factors on burnout, yet neglect the personal locus of control. There are fewer studies that have been combined locus of control with teacher burnout. Thus, the present study aims to investigate the status quo of college English teachers’burnout and locus of control, to explore the correlation between teacher burnout and locus of control through questionnaire. Meanwhile, the present study also proposes some related suggestions. This study investigates145college English teachers of3universities in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Through data analysis and discussion, the findings of the study can be summarized as follows:1) At present,95%college English teachers do have moderate burnout level with high score in the dimension of emotional exhaustion in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.2) There is no significant difference between teacher burnout and gender, age, years of teaching, professional titles, and educational background. To be specific, male teachers are prone to be more emotionally exhausted and depersonalized; teachers with31-35years and5-10years of teaching are higher in emotional exhaustion, those with36-40years and3-5years of teaching get higher scores in reduced personal accomplishment, and those with36-40years and10-15years of teaching get higher scores in depersonalization; teachers with master degree get higher burnout level than those with bachelor degree.3) College English teachers get higher scores in internality, but most of the participants believe that events happening in their lives are determined by powerful others and chance, that is to say, the factors are external. Only fewer of them believe that the events happening in their lives are determined by their own efforts, behaviors and abilities, that is to say, the internal factors are decisive.4) There is no significant correlation between college English teachers’locus of control and age, teaching years, educational background. While there exists significant relationship between college English teachers’ locus of control and gender, professional title.5) The correlation between teacher burnout and locus of control:the burnout level of internals is less heavier than externals, externals are easier to get burnout. To be more specific, there exits moderate positive correlation between locus of control and emotional exhaustion, depersonalization; the correlation between teacher burnout and internal locus of control is negatively significant, while positively significant with externals.Through the linear regression analysis, the result shows that the prediction of locus of control to teacher burnout is31.9%, which means that locus of control is one of the factors that influences teacher burnout. Therefore, the present author puts forward some related suggestions so as to relieve teacher burnout from the perspective of improving college English teachers’ locus of control. |
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