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Preface

This book introduces readers to the developing field of language teacher efficacy (LTE) research. Teacher efficacy has been extensively studied within the wider field of education; however, it has received less attention within the field of applied linguistics. This book helps readers to locate language teacher efficacy within the field of teacher efficacy research, and focuses on the Japanese high school language teaching context. It discusses personal and collective dimensions of language teacher efficacy related to personal second language (L2) capability, instructional L2 efficacy and collective capability towards collaboration. This book presents previously unpublished research exploring the factors that influence language teacher efficacy, with discussion about the ways in which these beliefs develop.

Teacher efficacy is discussed in this book as a type of self-efficacy, and refers to the self-beliefs of teachers about their perceived capability to execute actions and achieve valued teaching outcomes, via personal and collective effort (Bandura, 1997, 2006). A variety of terms have been used in the applied linguistics research literature to refer to the self-efficacy for teaching beliefs of language teachers, such as teaching self-efficacy (e.g. Hiver, 2013), English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher self-efficacy (e.g. Hoang, 2018), language teacher self-efficacy (e.g. Wyatt, 2018b) and EFL teacher collective efficacy (e.g. Göker, 2012). This book uses the term language teacher efficacy (LTE) as it aligns with the use of the term ‘teacher efficacy’ to refer to teacher self-efficacy beliefs in the wider fields of education and psychology; can be used to discuss efficacy as individual or collective beliefs; and can be applied to a variety of language teaching contexts (e.g. English as a second language [ESL], EFL and the teaching of languages other than English).

My Interest in Language Teacher Efficacy

This book, and the research presented here, came about from my experience as a teacher educator in Japan, during a period of curriculum reform that mandated L2-speaking teachers, at the high school level, to use English as the primary language for carrying out their classes. As a contributor to teacher training workshops, I met many highly motivated teachers giving up their weekends to attend seminars and attempt to learn useful new teaching strategies in preparation for the new curriculum. However, I also met teachers – many of whom were forced to attend such workshops – who were the opposite.

I began to see a difference in the respective ‘confidence’ of teachers towards the different teaching tasks that the new curriculum guidelines encouraged. I began to wonder how confident are they about using English to teach? How confident are they about developing new activities? How can I further investigate confidence towards different teaching tasks?

My focus on teacher ‘confidence’ further developed out of a collaborative project I carried out with a high school Japanese teacher of English (JTE) during the early 2010s (see Thompson & Yanagita, 2017). The teacher was struggling to understand exactly how to apply communicative language teaching (CLT) in her classes, and as noted in other studies (Cook, 2009; Underwood, 2012), she faced resistance towards implementing change in materials design and teaching from her colleagues, who preferred to rely on the grammar-translation teaching method called yakudoku. The teacher asked me to work with her as a mentor, and from my participant-observer status, I became interested in the change in her ‘confidence’ over the course of the project, as I learned about the broader teaching environment within which she worked.

I surveyed the teacher cognition literature in order to identify a theoretical construct that specifically discussed the interaction between teachers’ perceptions of confidence, their teaching behaviour and how these were dynamically influenced by the contexts that they worked within. As a result, I developed an interest in language teacher efficacy, which I define as the beliefs that teachers have about their perceived capability to organise and carry out courses of action in order to effectively support the development of student L2 language ability.

As Bandura (1997) has explained, feelings about experience (i.e. affective states) help shape and determine beliefs, and teacher self-beliefs have been argued as key mediators of teacher behaviour (Borg, 2003, 2006). Given the dynamic relationship between affect, beliefs and practice, the teacher efficacy research reported in this book grew out of a desire to explore what influenced JTEs’ self-beliefs about their capability to effectively teach English in their classrooms.

Overview of the Book

This book discusses findings from a sequential mixed method study of the self-efficacy for teaching beliefs of Japanese high school English language teachers. Certain chapters may be of more interest to different readers, and accordingly each is written in such a way that readers can visit and draw on different chapters without needing to read the entire book. I know that I seldom read a research book in full, and certainly not in one sitting, thus I have attempted to write this book as a series of integrated chapters that do not necessarily require the reader to read each page of each chapter.

The book has 11 chapters. The first chapter introduces the reader to the context of the study, including the background of the research discussed in this book, contextual features of the Japanese language teaching environment and how this study of language teacher efficacy developed from an interest in language teacher ‘confidence’ towards the use of the L2 for language instruction.

Chapter 2 introduces readers to teacher efficacy within the theoretical framework of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1997, 2006) by tracing a brief history of teacher efficacy research, discussing the theoretical basis of efficacy beliefs as mediators of behaviour and considering the sources and assessment of efficacy beliefs. Chapter 3 then focuses specifically on language teacher efficacy beliefs, and further discusses the ideas raised in Chapter 2 by focusing on research carried out within the field of language teaching. It highlights the ways in which the current study contributes to knowledge within this developing field, and suggests some areas where further study is needed.

The following two chapters move from the why and what towards the how. Chapter 4 discusses conceptual and measurement considerations for LTE researchers, introduces some approaches for examining language teacher efficacy and, as an example, provides the research design for the study discussed in this book, including discussion about the limitations of the research.

One concern for teacher efficacy researchers is how to design surveys with strong construct and cultural validity that reflect the actual tasks where teacher efficacy beliefs operate in specific settings. Chapter 5 introduces the design process of the efficacy scale used in the research reported in this book. The Japanese Teacher of English Teacher Efficacy Scale (JTE-TES) represents an attempt to design a scale with task and contextual relevance for a specific population (i.e. for Japanese teachers of English). However, given that many of the challenges faced by JTEs are reflective of difficulties faced by language teachers in various contexts, the scale may also have utility for examining language teacher efficacy in other countries and teaching situations.

Chapter 6 discusses efficacy towards different teaching tasks, and introduces various domains of language teacher efficacy. Three of these dimensions are further explored in Chapters 7–9. Chapter 7 examines efficacy towards the use of the L2 as part of the teaching process, Chapter 8 discusses L2 instructional efficacy and Chapter 9 focuses on L2 teacher efficacy beliefs towards collaboration. In each of these chapters, both the dimension of efficacy and factors that may influence these beliefs are examined.

Chapter 10 focuses on the development of language teacher efficacy beliefs. This chapter synthesises findings from interviews with teachers and teacher consultants working in Japan, to discuss the sources of efficacy beliefs and their development. It notes the strong influence of social forces on teacher efficacy beliefs in the Japanese context, contributing to a growing discussion about the potential role of cultural forces as an influence on the development of teacher efficacy beliefs.

Finally, this book concludes by looking forward. Chapter 11 provides a brief summary of the main contributions of this study, before providing suggestions for future language teacher efficacy research. The research presented in this book highlights the multidimensional nature of language teacher efficacy beliefs, and identifies a number of personal and contextual variables that could be explored in future studies, both within Japan and in the wider field of language education.