EFL/ESL Teacher’s Resilience, Academic Buoyancy, Care, and Their Impact on Students’ Engagement: A Theoretical Review

Abstract

Teachers’ emotions and inner states play a crucial role in academia as they affect almost all aspects of their job. Language teaching as a stressful and tense profession is full of adversities and traumatic experiences, mandating teachers to be psychologically tough aside from their pedagogical readiness. In tune with this, the current study provides an overview of this area of research drawing on positive psychology and four fresh constructs, namely, resilience, buoyancy, care, and students’ engagement. More particularly, this review article presents the definitions, conceptualizations, dimensions, cognate terms, and influential factors related to each construct. Next, related empirical studies are reviewed to justify the results and position the current article in the body of knowledge in this domain. Finally, implications, gaps, and recommendations for future research are presented.

A Review of the Relationship Between EFL Teachers’ Academic Buoyancy, Ambiguity Tolerance, and Hopelessness

“…This entails academic buoyancy which refers to the ability to manage, tolerate, and overcome the adversities and setbacks of an educational context ( Comerford et al, 2015 ). As put by Zhang (2021) , buoyancy is the positive side of resilience that is affected by both internal and external factors (e.g., inner feelings and contextual factors). Additionally, being buoyant in the face of adversities existing in academia is a precondition for transmitting knowledge on the part of the teachers.…”

The Influence of English as a Foreign Language Teachers’ Positive Mood and Hope on Their Academic Buoyancy: A Theoretical Review

“…Buoyancy like many other psychological factors can be affected by inner and outer factors. In other words, both internal feelings and contextual variables have a role to play in a teacher’s level of buoyancy ( Zhang, 2021 ). Despite the existence of empirical studies on the construct of academic buoyancy, as a positive form of resilience, they have been limited to EFL students (e.g., Putwain et al, 2015 ; Yun et al, 2018 ) and few studies have explored this variable in relation to EFL teachers, its impact on their instruction, and whether it can be predicted by other teacher emotions or not ( Zhang, 2021 ).…”

“…In other words, both internal feelings and contextual variables have a role to play in a teacher’s level of buoyancy ( Zhang, 2021 ). Despite the existence of empirical studies on the construct of academic buoyancy, as a positive form of resilience, they have been limited to EFL students (e.g., Putwain et al, 2015 ; Yun et al, 2018 ) and few studies have explored this variable in relation to EFL teachers, its impact on their instruction, and whether it can be predicted by other teacher emotions or not ( Zhang, 2021 ). To fill this gap, the present review article was an effort to review the definitions, theoretical underpinnings, empirical findings, and associations between three less explored variables in teacher psychology, namely positive mood, hope, and academic buoyancy.…”

“…Additionally, it capitalizes more on strengths than weaknesses, takes proactive and not reactive approaches in the face of challenges, and examines “many and healthy” cases instead of “extreme cases” ( Martin and Marsh, 2019 ). Owing to this positive emotion orientation, academic buoyancy is known as the positive form of resilience ( Zhang, 2021 ).…”

“…Hence, to perform satisfactorily in EFL contexts, one needs to know the difficulties and prepare proper coping strategies not to fringe in the face of adversity. With this knowledge, over the past years, different scholars from different parts of the world have conducted investigations on buoyancy signifying its positive effects on students’ achievement, motivation, participation, self-efficacy, persistence, self-esteem, exam performance, sustainability, competence, classroom enjoyment, self-regulation strategies, engagement, commitment, and decreasing stress and anxiety (e.g., Malmberg et al, 2013 ; Yun et al, 2018 ; Jahedizadeh et al, 2019 ; Wang and Guan, 2020 ; Zhang, 2021 ). Despite these studies and the motivational cores unpacked by this concept, it has been mostly explored from the vantage point of students and investigations in EFL/ESL contexts are still insufficient in this area.…”