The psychological capital of foreign language teachers

This international research project aims to explore Teachers Psychological Capital (TPC) amongst foreign language teachers. This work has become increasingly urgent as language teachers face multiple challenges, including shifting language policies and changing job expectations that can challenge their professional identities. To investigate the psychological capital of teachers, we draw on insights from positive and ecological psychology to create our understanding of TPC. These include the HERO model of psychological capital, comprising hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism (Luthans, Youssef-Morgan & Avolio, 2015), affordances and the PERMA model, which adds more of a social perspective to psychological well-being focusing on positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishments (Seligman, 2011). This project aims to establish an ecologically valid model of TPC and understand how it develops in different contexts (Austria and the UK) for teachers at different career phases teaching different foreign languages. We propose a three-stage, mixed-method study. Specifically, we aim to answer the following questions: 1. To what extent does the TPC model describe the psychological capital of foreign language teachers at different stages of their careers? 2. What types of TPC profiles can be identified in the foreign language teacher populations in Austria and the UK at the secondary school level? 3. What age, gender or geographical differences are there in the distribution of these profiles? 4. What leads to teachers current TPC profiles from an ecological perspective? 5. What implications can be drawn for teacher professional development and policy support for foreign language teachers across the career trajectories? In the first stage of the study, we will use focus groups composed of teachers with different years of teaching experience in Austria and the UK. This will help us to refine our theoretically generated model to ensure more ecological validity. Building on these findings, we will then conduct a large- scale online questionnaire survey. These data will be analysed to create a number of prototypical teacher profiles. Finally, we will interview language teachers representative of each profile type about their professional life history in order to retrospectively reconstruct their professional trajectories and ecologies. This will help us to understand how the TPC profiles outcomes emerged over time in specific teaching contexts. In addition to shedding light on an exciting under-researched psychological construct in two important but very different language learning contexts, our project hopes to be able to make specific recommendations for teacher educators, school leaders and policy makers about how best to support teacher professional wellbeing in diverse contemporary educational contexts.

Teacher wellbeing is a key determinant not only of teachers' job satisfaction and willingness to remain committed to the profession, but also of the quality of teaching and thus ultimate achievement of learners. However, although the topic of teacher wellbeing has begun to gain increasing attention, research focusing on language teachers remains extremely rare. Our project has contributed to this limited body of research by exploring the resources language teachers draw on to manage their wellbeing and cope with the challenges of the profession. We examined language teacher wellbeing taking two innovative perspectives. Firstly, we explored language teachers' experiences of wellbeing embedded within their social, cultural, and political contexts. Secondly, we examined the wellbeing of language teachers at different phases of their careers to understand the dynamics of wellbeing across the career trajectory. We focused on four career phases: pre-service (combination of studies and practica), early-career (0-7 years of teaching experience), mid-career (8-23 years of teaching experience), and late-career (24+ years of teaching experience). The project consisted of three main phases. In Phase 1, we collected 58 interviews with language teachers in Austria and UK at different stages of their career, in order to compare their wellbeing across the two contexts and career stages. In Phase 2, we conducted a global survey with 472 teachers, in order to identify profiles of teachers based on their wellbeing. In Phase 3, we interviewed 27 teachers in 14 different countries to explore their wellbeing generally and to understand how they coped with the challenges brought by the pandemic. The insights gained from the project have contributed significantly to developments in the areas of theory building, empirical insights, and practical implications. Firstly, the research has contributed to an understanding of the interplay of psychological, emotional, physical, and contextual factors in shaping the wellbeing of language teachers. Secondly, the study has generated valuable insights into the dynamics of language teacher wellbeing across the career span by investigating language teachers at diverse stages of their careers. The study also offered a comparative perspective across two language learning and teaching contexts, UK and Austria, which has led to context-sensitive views of wellbeing. These insights have been vital in broadening theoretical conceptualisations of wellbeing as a socially determined construct with the potential for individual variation. Finally, the unique perspective offered by the Covid-19 pandemic enabled additional insights into wellbeing of the teachers in a time of crisis.