Study On Guangxi Secondary School EFL Teachers' Burnout And Its Effective Factors

Burnout is a new research field. It is used to describe a series of negative symptoms, such as tiredness, ability descent, passion losing, apathy to others and efficacy. With the development of the society and the intensification of the competition, the professional pressures which secondary school teachers have to endure become greater and greater, which paves the way to teacher burnout. Teacher burnout is detrimental to the secondary school teachers as well as the students. The burn-out teachers will easily lose the patience and the compassion to the students, reduce the sense of achievement and cannot devote themselves to this profession. This will affect the education effect.Teacher burnout requires greater attention, but few researches have met these needs especially the research on the burnout of secondary school English teachers in China.The present study adopts a questionnaire to investigate 271 EFL teachers in 19 secondary schools in Guangxi. This questionnaire consists of three parts: the first part is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) proposed by Maslach, which consists of three dimensions—Emotional Exhaustion, Depersonalization and Reduced Personal Achievement, and is used to find out the burnout level of Guangxi secondary school EFL teachers; the second part is about the personal information to detect the relationship between personal domain and teacher burnout; the third part concerns the Effective Factors in Occupational Environmental Domain, which is on the basis of the Leadership Behavior Descriptive Questionnaire constructed by Halpin and the Organizational Climate Index by Cooper, and is designed to detect the relationship between occupational Environmental domain and teacher burnout. The general statistical results of the study indicate that:(1) Teachers'overall burnout level: Guangxi secondary school EFL teachers have moderate burnout level with high score in the dimension of Emotional Exhaustion, high score in Depersonalization, and low score in Reduced Personal Accomplishment;(2) (Relationship between) teachers'personal domain and job burnout: there are no significant differences between teacher's duty, teacher's rank, teaching grades and the location of schools and MBI dimensions, but significant differences have been observed in terms of gender, age, teaching experiences, education background, the school types (key schools or non-key schools), honor received and their academic achievement (thesis publishing and seminar participation). That is to say, male teachers are prone to be more emotionally exhausted to their job and more detached from students; teachers who age from 31 to 40 years old and who have 11 to 15 years of teaching experiences score higher in all three dimensions of burnout than any other groups; teachers who have got master degree and who teach in senior high schools tend to suffer more from burnout; EFL teachers who render service in key schools have higher emotional exhaustion and depersonalization than those in non-key schools; outstanding EFL teachers suffer more emotional exhaustion while non-honored EFL teaches score higher in Depersonalization and Reduced Personal Accomplishment than other groups; for academic achievement, the EFL teachers who have their thesis published and have taken part in the various forms of seminars are prone to score higher in all three dimensions than those who have not.(3) (Relationship between) teachers'occupational environmental domain and job burnout: the effective factors in occupational environmental domain are categorized into three main factors: society factors, school factors, and career factors. These three main factors in occupational environmental domain all affect the EFL teachers'burnout level. Among them, the school factors have positive predictive power in all three dimensions while social factors and career factors merely have positive predictive power in terms of Emotional Exhaustion and Depersonalization. Among the sub-factors, students, workload, organizational climate, achievement standard, and education reform are the top five sub-factors contributing to secondary school EFL teachers'burnout.Those results of the questionnaire support the view that the personal domain and occupational environmental domain have predictive power on teacher burnout level. Then, the present study provides some useful proposals to reducing teacher burnout—the adjustments in personal domain and in occupational environmental domain.Limitations as well as recommendations are discussed in the study. For instance, more variables are needed in further research; moreover, multiple data collection techniques are needed to get more accurate information. Therefore, the results obtained in the present study leave much to be improved and is hoped that further research will lead to more comprehensive and accurate results.