Language teachers’ coping strategies during the Covid-19 conversion to online teaching: Correlations with stress, wellbeing and negative emotions

By P. Macintyre, T. Gregersen, Sarah Mercer. System (Linköping), 2020

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Teaching often is listed as one of the most stressful professions and being a language teacher triggers its own unique challenges. Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have created a long list of new stressors for teachers to deal with, including problems caused by the emergency conversion to online language teaching. This article examines the stress and coping responses of an international sample of over 600 language teachers who responded to an online survey in April 2020. The survey measured stressors and 14 coping strategies grouped into two types, approach and avoidant. Substantial levels of stress were reported by teachers. Correlations show that positive psychological outcomes (wellbeing, health, happiness, resilience, and growth during trauma) correlated positively with approach coping and negatively with avoidant coping. Avoidant coping, however, consistently correlated (rs between 0.42 and 0.54) only with the negative outcomes (stress, anxiety, anger, sadness, and loneliness). In addition, ANOVA showed that although approach coping was consistently used across stress groups, avoidant coping increased as stress increased suggesting that there may be a cost to using avoidant coping strategies. Stepwise regression analyses using the 14 specific coping strategies showed a complex pattern of coping. Suggestions for avoiding avoidance coping strategies are offered.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a44a3f232a2676665a07492264c1e633860dfeba

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In Clinical Psychology

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Understanding language teacher wellbeing: An ESM study of daily stressors and uplifts (2020, background): “For language teachers, responses to stress will change over time, and ‘there may be moments when denial, distraction, venting, and so on are the best available responses as a short-term strategy’ (MacIntyre et al., 2020).”
Teaching during COVID-19: The Decisions Made in Teaching (2021, background): “Previous research in the context of COVID-19 has also shown that uncertainty [9], the workload of teachers [6,49] and general teachers’ work-related stress [8,10] has increased in distance learning settings, and this has also affected teachers’ teaching practice.”