https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168820938814
Language Teaching Research
1–16
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1362168820938814
journals.sagepub.com/home/ltr
LANGUAGE
TEACHING
RESEARCH
Commitment to the
profession of ELT and an
organization: A profile of
expat faculty in South Korea
Ian Moodie
Mokpo National University, South Korea
Abstract
Despite its attention in the field of education, occupational commitment has received little
attention in language teaching research. To address this gap, the study generates an occupational
commitment profile of expatriate English language teachers and investigates how commitment
relates to their age, sex, teaching experience, and qualifications. Eighty-two native English-
speaking teachers at a private university in South Korea participated in the study by completing
a survey measuring their affective, continuance, and normative commitment to the profession
of English language teaching (ELT) and to their workplace. The descriptive results indicated that
the sample had high affective commitment to the profession of ELT but low overall commitment
to their organization. Results from MANCOVA, which controlled for the covariates of age and
sex, indicated that respondents with teacher qualifications from their home countries tended
to have higher levels of affective and normative commitment to the profession of ELT and
to their workplace than respondents without teacher qualifications. However, no differences
in commitment were found between respondents with ELT qualifications and respondents
without ELT qualifications, nor were any differences found in commitment associated with
ELT experience. Because affective-normative dominant profiles are associated with better
workplace outcomes, such as effort given to an organization and lower turnover intentions,
further consideration of this finding should be of high priority in language teacher commitment
research.
Keywords
English language teaching, language teacher cognition, occupational commitment, organizational
commitment, South Korea, teacher commitment
Corresponding author:
Ian Moodie, Department of English Education, Mokpo National University, Sabeom 204, 1666 Yeongsan-ro,
Cheonggye-myeon, Muan-gun, Jeollanam-do, 58554, South Korea.
Email: ianmoodie@gmail.com
938814LTR 0 0 10.1177/1362168820938814Language Teaching ResearchMoodie
research-article 2020
Article