DE-MOTIVATORS, BURNOUT AND LANGUAGE ACHIEVEMENT IN AN IRANIAN EFL CONTEXT

The present study probed 250 English as foreign language (EFL) learners' de-motivation by investigating its role in students' burnout, i.e., a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding or stressful. It also sought to examine the indirect impact of de-motivation and direct impact of burnout on language achievement among Iranian English learners. To do so, a two-phase study was designed. The first phase comprised an array of different steps to validate the Persian version of the 'de-motivation scale' designed by Sakai and Kichuki (2009). It measures six constructs: teachers, characteristics of classes, experiences of failure, class environment, class materials, and lack of interest. In the second phase, the researchers utilized the validated questionnaire along with the student version of Maslach Burnout Inventory (Schaufeli et al., 2002) to explore the relationship among students' de-motivation, their burnout, and achievement. The latter scale measures three dimensions of burnout, namely, emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and academic inefficacy. The results of reliability estimates and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity indices of the Persian version of 'demotivation scale'. The findings of the second phase yielded via structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that students' de-motivation positively predicted students' burnout with 'class materials' and 'lack of interest' having the highest influence. Burnout in turn was found to negatively influence language achievement.