Thriving or surviving? Language educators’ post-pandemic health and wellbeing

Abstract

Teaching is a stressful profession, with language educators more susceptible to emotional exhaustion, burnout, and attrition than their colleagues in other disciplines (Moser & Wei, 2024; Sulis et al., 2022). Novice language educators, in particular, are more affected by disciplinary stressors and require different support than experienced peers to attain workplace wellbeing (e.g., Babic et al., 2023). The COVID-19 pandemic added emotional and professional stressors to language teaching (Crane, 2020), as the shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT) heightened care work and pedagogical demands(MacIntyre et al., 2020; Warner & Diao, 2022). While these challenges are well-documented, little is known about language educators’ post-pandemic workplace wellbeing. Adopting a career stage lens (Day et al., 2007), this study examined the emotional and psychological wellbeing, physical health, and emotion regulation capacity of 254 early and mid-to-late career language educators in 2023. While participants reported strong health and wellbeing overall, early-career educators (i.e., whose careers started in or after spring 2020) reported lower wellbeing and emotion regulation capacities than their more experienced colleagues. Given that workplace wellbeing can protect against stress and burnout, results point to the benefit of tailoring professional development programming to career stage-specific needs to support effective and sustained workplace wellbeing.