Vol.:(0123456789) Interchange https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-023-09497-5 1 3 Immunized Iranian EFL Teachers During COVID‑19 Pandemic: The Mediating Role of Teacher Occupational Stress, Enjoyment, and Experience Shiva Azizpour 1  · Natasha Pourdana 1  · Payam Nour 1,2 Accepted: 6 June 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023 Abstract Language teachers tolerated major challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. In such stressful teaching environments, Language Teacher Immunity (LTI) was intro- duced to function as a protective armor. This study explored the potential contri- butions of teacher occupational stress, foreign language teaching enjoyment, and teaching experience to LTI formation in Iranian EFL teachers during the pandemic in terms of (1) their pairwise associations, (2) traces of diference in those associa- tions, and (3) their predictive power. A total of 208 Iranian EFL teachers were non- randomly selected, grouped into the novice and the experienced, and surveyed with validated questionnaires. Multiple correlation analyses depicted a positive pairwise relationship between LTI, occupational stress, teaching experience, and teaching enjoyment; a negative pairwise relationship between occupational stress, teaching experience, and teaching enjoyment; and no signifcant relationship between teach- ing experience, and teaching enjoyment in both groups. Diferences in the observed associations were statistically signifcant only for LTI/teaching experience, and LTI/ occupational stress in both groups. Moreover, multiple regression analysis indicated that occupational stress and teaching enjoyment could explain 47.3% of the LTI var- iance in the experienced and only 14.9% in the novice teachers. Findings implied that the developed LTI in Iranian EFL teachers was productive and a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis. Keywords COVID-19 · Foreign language teaching enjoyment · Language teacher immunity · Teacher occupational stress · Teaching experience Introduction With the worldwide surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, schools and uni- versities in many countries were forced to cease face-to-face education and rapidly tran- sitioned to distance education to ensure uninterrupted learning during the pandemic Extended author information available on the last page of the article