Language teachers’ coping strategies during the Covid-19 conversion to online teaching: Correlations with stress, wellbeing and negative emotions

Teaching often is listed as one of the most stressful professions and being a language teacher triggers its own unique challenges. Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have created a long list of new stressors for teachers to deal with, including problems caused by the emergency conversion to online language teaching. This article examines the stress and coping responses of an international sample of over 600 language teachers who responded to an online survey in April 2020. The survey measured stressors and 14 coping strategies grouped into two types, approach and avoidant. Substantial levels of stress were reported by teachers. Correlations show that positive psychological outcomes (wellbeing, health, happiness, resilience, and growth during trauma) correlated positively with approach coping and negatively with avoidant coping. Avoidant coping, however, consistently correlated (rs between 0.42 and 0.54) only with the negative outcomes (stress, anxiety, anger, sadness, and loneliness). In addition, ANOVA showed that although approach coping was consistently used across stress groups, avoidant coping increased as stress increased suggesting that there may be a cost to using avoidant coping strategies. Stepwise regression analyses using the 14 specific coping strategies showed a complex pattern of coping. Suggestions for avoiding avoidance coping strategies are offered.