English teacher well-being in the face of the pandemic: An investigation in the southeast of Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Teaching has become a profession frequently characterized by high levels of stress and low professional well-being. However, being a language teacher triggers its own unique challenges, considering the emotional labor and pedagogical demands of language teaching and learning given their typical heavy workloads, time pressures, and difficulties juggling roles. As such, there is an increasing need for teacher well-being in language teaching. This is because teacher well-being plays a critical role in the ability of language teachers at all levels of teaching to build positive relationships with learners, teach creatively, and manage discipline problems, and it also contributes to heightening learners' level of achievement. When teachers enjoy well-being, they are able to teach to the best of their abilities. However, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic created a long list of new stressors for teachers. Thus, it has become inevitable for teachers, especially language teachers to begin exploring and engaging in self-care to cope with these stressors. This chapter takes a look at language teachers' experiences of stress and their well-being in order to cast light on how teachers experience stress on a daily basis, in what contexts, and how they are able to recover from experiences of stress. Research data were generated through 3 instruments administered to 6 teachers. The most stressful experiences reported by teachers were workload, and other teaching-related stressors such as blurred times between home and work, loss of control over personal decisions, the stress of online teaching, irregular working hours, and finances. Teachers reported being more worried about the health of others than their own, a realistic fear heightened by the disproportionate danger COVID-19 poses for their health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)