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Abstract
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Significance of the Research
The significance of the present study can be understood from theoretical, empirical, methodological, and practical perspectives. Collectively, these contributions address important needs within the growing body of research on teacher psychology in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education.
From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes to the expanding positive psychology agenda in SLA by integrating four constructs that have largely been investigated in isolation: self-compassion, perceived school climate, loving pedagogy, and Foreign Language Teaching Enjoyment (FLTE) (Dewaele et al., 2019; MacIntyre et al., 2019; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014). Although previous studies have independently documented the importance of these variables for teacher wellbeing and professional functioning, limited attention has been devoted to understanding how they interact within a unified explanatory framework. By drawing on Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), the present study advances a more holistic conceptualization of teacher psychology, recognizing professional experiences as products of reciprocal interactions between individual psychological resources and contextual environmental conditions. In doing so, it contributes to the growing ecological turn in language education research and provides a theoretically grounded explanation of how internal and external influences jointly shape positive professional outcomes.
The study also holds considerable empirical significance. While self-compassion has been associated with resilience, emotional regulation, and work engagement (Hu, 2023; Zhang & Fathi, 2024), perceived school climate has been linked to teacher wellbeing and teaching enjoyment (Chu et al., 2025; Zhang et al., 2023), and loving pedagogy has been examined in relation to various teacher- and learner-related outcomes (Derakhshan et al., 2023; Wang et al., 202
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