The relationship between the emotional labour and burnout levels of EFL teachers working at university preparatory schools

Emotional well-being of a teacher may be threatened by several factors such as emotional labour (EL), the management of one's feelings for the sake of organizational goals, which may result in the experience of burnout. Despite the increased amount of research investigating the relation between EL and burnout in different fields of study, the concept has been underexplored within the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). For this reason, the current study sought to explore the relation between EL and burnout among the English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers working at foundation and state universities located in Istanbul. The study adopted a quantitative research design and employed T-test, Pearson correlation, one-way ANOVA, and multiple regression analyses so as to answer the formulated research questions. The data was collected from 179 EFL teachers working at the preparatory schools of two foundation and three state universities in İstanbul through the Turkish versions of the Emotional Labour Scale (Diefendorff, Croyle, & Gosserand, 2005) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory Educators Survey (Maslach, Jackson, & Schwap, 1986). The results revealed that naturally felt emotions (NFE) and emotional exhaustion were the most frequently felt dimensions of EL and burnout, respectively. EL and burnout levels of EFL teachers were found to have a statistically significant difference in terms of their institution type and years of experience. As a result of the correlational analysis, surface acting was found to be positively correlated with all the subscales of burnout, whereas NFE was negatively correlated with them. The study is expected to take the initiative of EL studies in the field of ELT in Turkey, and to contribute both to the related literature and to the improvement of the teaching environment of ELT teachers.