The Role of EFL Teachers' Optimism and Commitment in Their Work Engagement: A Theoretical Review

Abstract

Teachers' emotional states such as optimism and commitment have long been approved influential in second/foreign language education. Although many correlational investigations have been conducted on teacher optimism and commitment, their interaction and kinship with teachers' work engagement have been largely ignored in the literature. Considering this situation, the present mini-review aims to present the theoretical underpinnings, definitions, dimensions, and conceptualizations of these three important variables taken from positive psychology. Moreover, the present review can offer a number of practical implications for EFL teachers, teacher educators, program designers, school principals, and L2 researchers, and raise their awareness of the impact of inner emotions on teachers' academic performance. Finally, research gaps and future directions are provided for eager researchers to run similar and complementary studies in EFL contexts.

Exploring a Structural Model of Teaching Enjoyment, Teacher Self-Efficacy, and Work Engagement

“…This is confirmed by Liu (2019) , who revealed that occupational self-efficacy was directly associated with organizational commitment and indirectly with work engagement via the mediating role of organizational commitment. Moreover, Dong and Xu’s (2022) review showed that EFL teachers’ commitment can reflect in their occupational engagement.…”

“…Due to the significance of emotional wellbeing as well as the burgeoning of positive psychology both in the field of psychology (e.g., Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000 ; Fredrickson, 2009 ) and FL education ( MacIntyre and Gregersen, 2012 ; Dewaele et al, 2019a ; Fathi and Mohammaddokht, 2021 ; Wang et al, 2021 ; Derakhshan et al, 2022 ), research has witnessed a surge of interest in teachers’ positive emotions ( Cowie, 2011 ; Khajavy, 2021 ). Hence, there has been an outstanding shift from exploring negative variables, including teacher stress ( Fathi and Derakhshan, 2019 ) and burnout ( Safari, 2021 ) to examining positive factors such as work engagement ( Dong and Xu, 2022 ), enjoyment ( Ergün and Dewaele, 2021 ), emotion regulation ( Fathi et al, 2021a ), psychological well-being ( Greenier et al, 2021 ), resilience ( Ayoobiyan and Rashidi, 2021 ), and job satisfaction ( Safari, 2021 ) and other emotion variables ( Cowie, 2011 ; Khajavy et al, 2018 ) in FL contexts. According to Boudreau et al (2018) , FL enjoyment (FLE) as a positive emotion has sparked many researchers’ keen interest in recent years ( Dewaele and Li, 2022 ).…”

The Role of EFL/ESL Teachers’ Psychological Empowerment and Optimism on Their Job Commitment

“…The concept of optimism is a psycho-emotional construct that took its roots in Bandura's social intellectual hypothesis, but boomed in positive psychology as a novel trend in educational psychology (Dong and Xu, 2022). It is regarded as a propensity to expect positive outcomes (Srivastava and Angelo, 2009).…”

“…By definition, optimism is one's positive expectation about the future in spite of the existing difficulties and setbacks (Carver and Scheier, 2002). It is a personal tendency to consider that one will experience good occasions in life and survive bad outcomes (Dong and Xu, 2022). In teaching, optimism means teachers' positive view about his/her ability to generate academic success among students despite challenges (Pathak and Lata, 2018).…”

“…In teaching, optimism means teachers' positive view about his/her ability to generate academic success among students despite challenges (Pathak and Lata, 2018). Optimistic teachers have been approved to enjoy high levels of resilience, efficacy, enthusiasm, and work engagement (Lu, 2021;Dong and Xu, 2022). When a teacher is psychologically empowered, by schools and administrators, his/her optimism level increases, too, and many academic outcomes emerge due to teacher's mental strengths and positive views of the future.…”