An Investigation of Burnout and Coping Strategies among English Language Instructors in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region

Teaching is one of the occupations where burnout can be quite prevalent, because it is a hard and arduous journey which requires a lot of demand on teachers. Stressors coming from the students, colleagues, administrators and the teaching environment may affect their inner feelings and their performance negatively. This study was conducted in seven universties in the Iraqi Kurdistan region to investigate the level of burnout and its causes among English language instructors in those universities. The study also aimed to find out how those instructors were coping with their burnout. The current study followed a mixed-methods approach, which means that both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 100 English language instructors working in these seven universities. In addition to the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educator Survey (MBI-ES) which was applied to 100 participants, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 volunteers. Data analysis revealed that burnout was prevalent among the instructors of English who participated in the study. Both emotional exhaustion subscale and depersonalization subscale were found to be moderate among those instructors. However, personal accomplishment subscale was low, indicating the existence of burnout. Regarding the causes of burnout, the results highlighted four main themes, namely, education system-related causes, government-related causes, teacher-related causes, and causes related to students. The participants also expressed the coping mechanisms they used to deal with their burnout. In addition, they suggested other coping strategies that the university administration should deploy to help the instructors cope with burnout. This study has a number of implications both for the English language instructors and the university administrations. It is recommended that the sense of low personal accomplishment must be addressed among instructors to avoid burnout. Also, the coping strategies pointed out by the participants might be helpful for other instructors who may be unaware of those strategies. Finally, the university authorities should highlight this issue in their future plans and help instructors to avoid frustration and be able to cope with burnout. Keywords: Burnout, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, personal accomplishment, English language instructors, coping strategies, Iraqi Kurdistan region.