Level Of Teaching Stress

It is an irrefutable fact that modern life style is accompanied with a great amount of stress and anxiety; and nowadays in many societies, individuals with a job find the workplace to be more stressful than it used to be. Selye (1976) argued that life without stress is neither plausible nor desirable. She also claimed that in reasonable doses, stress is a motivator and may enhance work performance. However, in unreasonable amounts, stress can become distress (Cedoline 1982). Teaching profession, especially English teaching, is no exception and teachers in the field of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) suffer from high levels of tension. Nagra and Arora (2013), borrowing from Hepburn and Brown (2001), concur that teaching as a profession also

Some scholars working in the field found no significant relationship between demographic factors like age or experience and the level of teaching stress experienced by instructors. For instance, Kyriacou and Sutcliffe (1979) in a study of 218 teachers from mixed comprehensive schools in England found no significant correlation between level of stress and age, length of experience and position held in school. Nevertheless, many others (Ameen, Guffey and Jackson 2010; Klassen and Chiu 2010; Powell and Ferraro 1960) argue that personal and environmental factors contribute to the level of stress perceived by teachers. For example, married teachers face huge amounts of responsibility and take the burden of keeping a balance between their job and family affairs. The situation becomes even tenser when children are involved, especially the ones who are dependent on parental resources like financial and emotional care. A correlational based study investigating the relationship between age, marital status and the way stress is perceived, conducted by Pološki Vokić (2008) revealed that marital status was among other affective factors on the perception of stress. To be more precise, married instructors suffered from higher levels of occupational

Some argue that as teachers get older, they become more experienced and have more control of tense situations. Travers (2001), for example, claims that age and experience have been linked to the experience of stress in teaching in that it has often been suggested that the highest levels of stress might be experienced by recent entrants to the profession (usually younger teachers). This may be due to the fact that they have not yet acquired the expertise required to cope with the job. Meanwhile others have found contradictory results indicating that younger teachers have more potential to control their stress on the job. Daniela Veronica (2011) notes that age and tenure have minimal effects on the level of stress. Although the differences were not statistically significant, he found a progression of the anxiety scores depending on age. Individuals from the young segment (24 – 35 years) of organizational adult age manifested fewer anxiety symptoms. He suggests that this is because, at this age, individuals mobilize themselves easier, and their professional motivation is stronger. On the other hand, aging brings a visible reduction of biological vigor for individuals over 50 years, although intellectually, their abilities achieve superior levels because of the accumulated