THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OCCUPATIONAL PROFESSIONALISM AND JOB SATISFACTION OF EFL TEACHERS

Abstract

Today, occupational professionalism and job satisfaction have great importance in education as in all sectors. Teachers' occupational professionalism and job satisfaction are important elements that boost education quality. It is thought that occupational professionalism affects job satisfaction and job satisfaction also affects occupational professionalism. So this research’s objective is to find out how job satisfaction and occupational professionalism in the field of English teaching relate to one another. For this study, quantitative research techniques were employed to gather data from a sample size of 150 English teachers who are currently teaching at state-run schools in a city of the southeastern Turkey. To gather information on participants' occupational professionalism and job satisfaction levels, researchers utilized both the Occupational Professionalism of Teachers Scale and the Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale. Means, standard deviations, percentages and frequencies were calculated through using software. Correlation coefficient of Spearman's rho was applied to assess the relation between occupational professionalism and job satisfaction. Furthermore, the analysis of one-way ANOVA and Kruskal Wallis H test have been employed to determine potential variations in the occupational professionalism and job satisfaction levels of English teachers in relation to their demographic characteristics. The findings showed that English teachers' occupational professionalism level is high and their job satisfaction level is medium. Moreover, a positively significant relationship was observed between the occupational professionalism of English teachers and their job satisfaction. Furthermore, no statistically significant variances were found in their occupational professionalism and job satisfaction based on demographic characteristics.