The Relationship between Iranian EFL Teachers’ Burnout and Self-Efficacy across English-Related vs. Non-English-Related Academic Degrees

The concepts of teacher efficacy and burnout have received significant consideration in teaching contexts recently which per se put premium upon teachers to ‎become the center ‎of attention in education since they play one of the most prominent roles in educational contexts (Abdollahzadeh & Rezaeian, 2011). Accordingly, the present study aimed to find out whether there would be any significant differences and correlations between Iranian EFL teachers’ self-efficacy and burnout with English-related and non-English-related academic degrees. To this end, 120 Iranian English language teachers (100 female and 20 male) from different institutes in Gorgan, Aliabad and Gonbad in Golestan Province of Iran were selected as the participants of the study. Their ages ‎ranged between 22 to 52 years. ‎Half of them studied English-related majors whereas the other half ‎studied non-English-related majors. They were selected through convenience sampling. Moreover, Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy’s (2001) self-efficacy‎ and Maslach and Jackson’s (1981) burnout questionnaires ‎were used as the instruments of the study. The design of the present study was correlational and ex post facto. Since the data were normally distributed, the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient and independent samples t-test were conducted to assess the relationship and difference between variables of two groups. The results of independent samples t-test revealed that there was no significant difference in the scores of related and non-English-related majors’ ‎in self-efficacy and burnout. Moreover, the results of Pearson correlation indicated that there was a positive and significant correlation between EFL-majored teachers’ self-efficacy and burnout. Additionally, there was no significant correlation between non-EFL-majored teachers’ self-efficacy ‎and ‎burnout. The findings of the present study throw some light on broadening our concepts of self-efficacy and burnout which might affect teachers’ performance in the classroom