A Study On The Correlation Between English Teachers’ Teaching Styles And Students’ Academic Self-efficacy In Junior High School

Teaching styles refer to the personalized teaching methods that teachers show in the long-term teaching process.Academic self-efficacy refers to learners’ level of self-confidence in their capabilities to achieve goals in the learning process.In teaching practice,“how to teach” is more important than “what to teach”,and teachers’ teaching styles have a significant impact on students’ academic self-efficacy and personality development.However,previous researches on the relation between teachers’ teaching styles and students’ academic self-efficacy are mostly theoretical researches and mainly focus on colleges.Therefore,it is of great significance to conduct empirical studies on the correlation between English teachers’ teaching styles and students’ academic self-efficacy in junior high school.Based on Bandura’s Social Learning theory(1989),four English teachers and 180 seventh graders in a junior high school from Changzhou were chosen as the participants.Through questionnaires,semi-structured interviews and classroom observation,this study aims at exploring the status quo of English teachers’ teaching styles and students’ academic self-efficacy in junior high school,the correlation between English teachers’ teaching styles and dimensions of students’ academic self-efficacy(i.e.the ability of overcoming difficulties,the confidence of learning English,and the ability of answering questions)as well as participants’ awareness of the relation between the two variables.Additionally,differences of academic self-efficacy between genders,between high-level groups and low-level groups are also analyzed.The data obtained from the study were analyzed by SPSS 23.The findings are as follows:(1)Precise-logical teaching style is adopted by most English teachers in junior high school,followed by caring-sharable teaching style and innovative-exploring teaching style.Humorous-active teaching style is the least usedone.(2)The overall academic self-efficacy of seventh graders is at a high level,but they are not confident in English study and need to improve their English learning capabilities constantly.There exist differences of academic self-efficacy between high-level and low-level groups,but not between genders.(3)There are correlations between English teachers’ teaching styles and dimensions of students’ academic self-efficacy in junior high school.Innovative-exploring teaching style and caring-sharable teaching style can indeed improve three dimensions of students’ academic self-efficacy.However,humorous-active teaching style cannot enhance students’ confidence of learning English and precise-logical teaching style cannot improve students’ ability of answering questions.(4)Both teachers and students reckon that there are certain correlations between English teachers’ teaching styles and students’ academic self-efficacy in junior high school.However,most English teachers are not aware of their teaching styles and lack professional training and self-reflection about it,students lack guidance on improving academic self-efficacy.Suggestions are put forward as follows:(1)Education departments and schools should emphasize the importance of teaching style,adding relevant courses in normal education and in-service teacher training;(2)Teachers should reflect on their own teaching styles actively and make corresponding adjustments actively to improve teaching efficiency;(3)Teachers should apply more performance assessment to give diversified and specific feedback and guidance to students;(4)Students should utilize more learning strategies to enhance sense of achievement and academic self-efficacy.This study has certain limitations,because teacher participants are solely females and student participants all come from urban areas.However,similar schools can learn from the data and findings of this study.Further researchers can expand the research scope and increase the relevant variables to make the research results more universal.