The Relationship between Iranian EFL Teachers Empowerment and Burnout

The concepts of teachers empowerment and burnout, as two important variables in the field of language teaching, have been proved to have considerable effect on teaching environment, students achievement, and some other issues related to language teaching and learning. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between teachers empowerment and their burnout and their relationship regarding gender. Moreover, another aim of this study was to examine which of the three components of burnout has the highest relationship with empowerment. To this end, 110 Iranian EFL teachers (44 males and 66 females), holding B.A. or M.A. degrees, with an age range of 20 to 45 years old from some language institutes in Bandar Abass and Zahedan participated in this study. The modified version of School Participant Empowerment Scale (Short & Rinehart, 1992) and Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educators Survey (Maslach, Schaufeli & Leiter, 2001) were used to gather data. The results of the Spearman’s correlation and Fisher’s Z comparison revealed that there was no significant relationship between teachers’ empowerment and their burnout. All of the correlations between empowerment and components of burnout were statistically significant, albeit negative and reduced personal accomplishment had the highest correlation with empowerment. Moreover, there was no significant relationship between empowerment and burnout regarding gender. The study has some implications for EFL and language institute administrators to consider the effective characteristics of empowerment and burnout on their decision making processes and how to lower the symptoms of burnout in English language teachers.

The Relationship between Iranian EFL Teachers Empowerment and Burnout Keywords:

Empowerment , Burnout , Gender , Iranian EFL Teachers