EFL teachers' coping strategies amidst the Covid-19 virtual education and their association with work engagement and teacher apprehension

Teaching can be considered as an extremely demanding and stressful occupation and being a language educator brings about its own distinctive challenges. In the wake of COVID-19 pandemic, teachers worldwide experienced fundamental changes in their profession and their lives as a whole. Coping with such an unprecedented situation and responses to it have created new and extra stressful factors for teachers to cope with, including the difficulties created by quick transition from direct teaching to virtual and remote teaching. This study examined EFL teachers' coping strategies during the Covid-19 virtual education and their association with work engagement and teacher apprehension. A total of 296 language instructors contributed to this study by participating in a survey in January 2021. To determine what coping strategies teachers use in virtual teaching during Covid-19, the researchers adapted the Brief-COPE scale designed and validated by Carver (Int J Behav Med 4:92–100, 1997) to make it appropriate for virtual education. The survey measured 11 coping strategies divided into two broad types, approach and avoidant. For measuring work engagement, the Work and Well-being Survey (UWES) scale designed and validated by Schaufeli and Bakker (Test manual for the Utrecht work engagement scale, vol 3. Utrecht University, The Netherlands, pp. 44–52, 2003. http://www.schaufeli.com) was utilized. To assess teachers' apprehension, the research employed the Sources of Teachers' Apprehension Scale (STAS) developed by Ghanizadeh et al. (Asia-Pac Educ Res 1–14, 2020). The result demonstrated that the adapted coping strategies scale enjoys acceptable reliability and validity indices. The results estimated via structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that EFL teachers' approach coping strategies positively and significantly predicted work engagement (β = 0.72, t = 10.56). Work engagement was negatively predicted by avoidant coping strategies (β = − 0.29, t = − 3.36). Teacher apprehension was negatively influenced by approach coping strategies (β = − 0.44, t = − 5.57) and positively by avoidant coping strategies (β = 0.43, t = 5.29). The study proposes some practical recommendations for overcoming the Covid-19 related challenges which could further deliver valuable guidance for supporting future training of teachers.