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The study aims to explore Teachers’ Psychological Capital (TPC) amongst foreign language teachers working in Austria and the UK. This is a three-year, FWF-funded international research project. The project has officially ended in September 2021, but we are still disseminating our research data.

The original purpose of this multi-phase project was to empirically examine the theoretical construct of Teachers’ Psychological Capital (TPC) amongst foreign language teachers in Austria and the UK, to identify TPC profiles in the foreign language teacher populations in Austria and the UK at the secondary school level, and to examine the ecological factors contributing to shaping these profiles. The project was extended to incorporate an in-depth examination of language teacher wellbeing across the career trajectory, with a particular focus on the personal and socio-contextual resources and challenges facing language teachers at specific phases of their career.

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This homepage will give you a regular update on our research, events we will attend or conduct and additionally give you the possibility to contact us with any questions or suggestions you might have.

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Special thanks to Wolfgang Irber https://wirber.de/ 

Following the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, which strongly affected language teacher wellbeing across the globe, our study was reconceptualised to understand how the language teachers were responding to the challenges brought by the pandemic drawing on their histories, current contexts, and perceived capitals as resources as well as coping strategies.

 

The findings of the project have contributed to underscoring the significance of language teacher psychology as a novel research field and enabled us to gain new empirical and theoretical insights into language teacher wellbeing. Our project has contributed by exploring the psychological strengths and the affordances language teachers draw on in their contexts to manage and nurture their wellbeing, taking two innovative perspectives. Firstly, language teacher wellbeing has been examined through an ecological perspective (Mercer, 2021), which enabled us to cast light on how teacher psychology is embedded within broader social, cultural, and political contexts which shape individuals’ experiences of wellbeing. The second innovative perspective in the study was to examine language teachers at different phases of their professional development Most research on teacher wellbeing to date has focused on pre-service and early-career stages, while research on language teacher wellbeing at mid- and late-career phases is particularly scarce. Thus, to create a comprehensive picture of language teacher wellbeing, this study has explored the personal and professional needs and strengths of teachers at different phases of their career trajectories, from pre-service to late-career.

(Last updated: May, 2022) 

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