Predictors of New Zealander and Iranian English Teachers’ Productive and Maladaptive Teacher Immunity

Document Type : Research article

Authors

1 Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Urmia University, Urmia, Iran

2 English Dept., Faculty of Farsi Literature, University of Tabriz

Abstract

This study strived to determine the main factors contributing to the New Zealander and Iranian English instructors’ productive and maladaptive teacher immunity. Moreover, it examined the differences between the productive and maladaptive teacher immunity types of these groups of teachers. To this end, first, the researchers used convenience sampling for selecting 294 male and female New Zealander English instructors and 286 male and female Iranian English instructors at language institute settings as participants. Second, they used Google Forms to administer the teacher immunity, emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, perfectionism, and demographic information questionnaires of the study to New Zealander and Iranian participants. New Zealander and Iranian teachers completed and returned these questionnaires to the researchers in a one-month and seventy-day periods of time, respectively. Third, the researchers used logistic regression and chi-square tests to perform the data analysis. The results indicated that New Zealander teachers’ emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and experience were the major factors in their productive and maladaptive teacher immunity.  On the other hand, Iranian teachers’ income, age, and emotional intelligence constituted the main factors in their teacher immunity types. Lastly, New Zealander teachers’ teacher immunity was more productive than Iranian instructors’ teacher immunity. The results were ascribed to the context-sensitive nature of English teachers’ productive and maladaptive teacher immunity. These results may have practical implications for the teacher education and supervisor education courses in foreign language contexts.

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