Investigating Junior High School Female English Teachers' Job Burnout

Education plays an important role in promoting a country's comprehensive strength.Teachers are the basis of educational reform and development,and are also key factors that determine the quality of education.Currently,teachers always bear larger working stress or pressure than other professions because of the intensification of competition in our society,and thus their job burnout is more likely to occur.Teachers who suffer job burnout are easily to feel emotionally exhausted and lack passion or enthusiasm for work.They will also behave passively in working and engage less in teaching activities,having no motivation in pursuit of further progress in their profession.Some of them even choose to quit teaching job after working a certain period of time.Job burnout has become the most common phenomenon that may damage teachers' psychological and physical health.The problem has attracted many scholars or educators' attention both home and abroad.Among English teachers,most of them are female teachers.The state quo of female English teachers is worthy of being researched.The study takes female English teachers of junior high school in Anning city as research subjects to try to answer the following questions: 1.What is the current situation of junior high school female English teachers' job burnout? 2.What are the major causes of causing junior high school female English teachers' job burnout? 3.What are the feasible and effective measures of alleviating the junior high school female English teachers' job burnout?In this study,questionnaire and interview are employed to collect data.The revised questionnaire is made from the perspectives of “emotional exhaustion”,“depersonalization” and “reduced personal achievement”,which are based on the three dimensions of job burnout(MBI)proposed by Maslach.The interviews are conducted by means of telephone interviews and in-depth face to face interviews to learn more about teachers' true feelings about teaching career.Burnout inventory data are collected and analyzed by using SPSS 17.0.The research results obtained from questionnaire survey and interview indicate that job burnout does exist among junior high school female English teachers in Anning City.Their job burnout is of a medium level,but tend to become worse if effective measures are not taken.The causes of junior high school female English teachers' job burnout are: fail to meet the requirements proposed by education reform and deal with the teachers' multiple roles,unscientific and irrational school management system,unsatisfactory incomes and material treatment,junior high school students' rebellion,independence and a lack of self-constraint all play their role in causing junior high school female English teachers' job burnout.As for the factors of causing junior high school female English teachers' job burnout,several suggested solutions to reduce female English teachers' job burnout are: provide them with instruction and help for their professional development through offering pre-service education and on-the-job training education,establish a salary incentive system to raise female teachers' income,set up suitable education and teaching system based on the local teaching reality and construct a kind of new relations between teachers and students might be taken as measures to reduce junior high school female English teachers' job burnout effectively.