A study on resilience among novice and experienced English language teachers in an EFL context

Resilience plays a vital role in education. It enables both students and teachers to get over the difficulties they come across in their personal, academic and professional lives. The small size of the studies that have been published in the literature highlights the difference in resilience between novice and experienced teachers. Many studies conducted in this field have generally dealt with student resilience. The main reason for choosing this topic is that teacher resilience is finally just as significant as student resilience. It is impossible to bring up resilient students without resilient teachers. The purpose of the present research is to investigate resilience levels, including Personal Competence and Persistence, Spiritual Influence, Family Cohesion, and Social Skills and Peer Support of novice and experienced English language teachers in an EFL context in Bitlis, Türkiye. 122 EFL teachers were divided into two groups: novices and experienced ones, based on their experience year in teaching English. In this thesis, a mixed-methods research design was utilized, and convenience sampling techniques and the voluntary response sampling method were used to reach out to participants. All the participants work in Bitlis, Türkiye. Google Forms and the Zoom platform were used to collect data. For the quantitative data, the Teacher Resilience Scale, which includes four subscales and 26 items, was utilized to address the questions regarding the differences in resilience levels of English language teachers. For the qualitative data, 8 semi- structured interview questions were used. The participants' answers on the whole demonstrated that there is no significant difference in total resilience level or the sublevels of novice and experienced English language teachers working in Bitlis. A broad theme emerged from the analysis that teachers may need ongoing support and resources to enhance their resilience level.