YUSHI HINOKI (RYUKOKU UNIVERSITY)

EFL TEACHERS' SELF-EFFICACY BELIEFS IN COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING: A JAPANESE MIDDLE-SCHOOL CONTEXT : METHODOLOGIES AND TEACHING APPROACHES

With the expansion of globalization, the Asia-Pacific countries have reformed their English education policies to encourage communicative language teaching (CLT) and boost learners’ communicative competence. Following this trend, Japan reformed The Course of Study (i.e., the national curriculum guidelines) in 2017 and demanded English teachers to implement CLT. However, there have been conflicting beliefs regarding which teaching approach to take: CLT or grammar-translation method (GTM). Based on Bandura’s (1997) social cognitive theory, teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs have been widely acknowledged as a cornerstone of successful teaching in the face of challenges, yet research is scarce in English as foreign language (EFL) settings (Hoang, 2018). Against this backdrop, the present research attempts to shed light on EFL teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs specifically in CLT at Japanese middle schools. Data were collected from middle-school English teachers in Japan (N = 90) using a modified version of Chacón’s (2005) English Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (ETSES). The exploratory factor analysis suggested that its factor structure remained the same as in previous studies (i.e., instructional strategies, classroom management, and student engagement). The descriptive statistics showed that the participants had moderately high degree of self-efficacy beliefs in CLT overall. A closer inspection, however, revealed that their self-efficacy beliefs were comparatively low in connecting grammatical instructions with communicative activities, implying that they somewhat believed that CLT and GTM are dichotomous teaching approaches. Implications will be given for educational stakeholders to improve EFL teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in CLT through harmonizing it with GTM.

Yushi Hinoki is an MA student at Ryukoku University, majoring in Language and Communication. His current thesis is concerned with teachers' self-efficacy beliefs in the context of teaching English as a foreign language. Specifically, EFL teachers' self-efficacy beliefs in communicative language teaching is his central research interest.