English as a foreign language teachers’ professional success, loving pedagogy and creativity: A structural equation modeling approach

Abstract

It is revealed in the literature that teachers are among the important elements to successful teaching and they have a dynamic power in bringing about educational improvement. Given the role of teachers’ emotional factors in the route of education, it is hypothesized that more issues such as creativity, loving pedagogy, and professional success can have a remarkable function in the academic path while their role remains unexplored and much ambiguity still exists about the relationship among them. To this end, 322 English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in different provinces of China gave their consent to join the study. As a result, they were asked to complete three questionnaires, namely, loving pedagogy, creativity, and teachers’ professional success. A Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach was utilized and this model included loving pedagogy predicting teacher professional success. Mediation analysis evaluated the impacts of four subscales of teacher creativity on the relationship between loving pedagogy and teacher professional success. Finally, some recommendations have been offered to language-teaching stakeholders in the EFL context to increase the expansion of educational research on various domains to trigger EFL teachers’ training programs that bring about teacher success and consequently students’ success.