A Study On Factors Influencing Junior High School English Teachers’ Self-efficacy

Teachers’ self-efficacy,as an important factor of teachers’ belief,is closely related with teachers’ professional development and affects all aspects of teachers’ classroom teaching.Although the research on teachers’ self-efficacy has caused wide concern of the scholars in various fields,research on junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy is relatively scarce.Teachers’ professional development has received more attention with the reformation of basic education curricula.Therefore,it is of great significance to understand junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy and the factors that affect junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy,in order to promote the professional development of junior high school English teachers and the reformation of the new curriculum.Based on this,the research questions in this study are as follows:(1)What are the situations of junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy?(2)What are the factors that affect junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy?The study is a combination of both quantitative and qualitative analysis of questionnaire and interview.Based on the questionnaire data of 98 junior high school English teachers,and then adopts Excel and SPSS(17.0)as instruments to conduct the average,independent sample t-test and one-way ANOVA,the junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy in Henan Province were investigated from six dimensions:teaching strategies and skills,classroom organization and management,student engagement,emotional attitude and cultural awareness,textbook processing and teacher-student interaction.Based on that,in order to have a better understanding of the situation of junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy and its influencing factors,semi-structured interviews with 4 junior high school English teachers are employed.The conclusions are drawn as follows by analysis of the data:(1)The study has found that the overall level of junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy is high.Besides,according to the calculated results of the means in the six fractal dimensions of English teachers’ self-efficacy,junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy in classroom management is the highest,followed by teacher-student interaction,textbook processing,instructional strategies and skills,in addition,junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy in student engagement and emotional attitude and cultural awareness have the same mean values ranking in the last.(2)Data that analyzed by independent sample t-test and one-way ANOVA shows that there is no significant difference between these variables: gender,school type,experience in teacher education,experience in studying abroad and junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy on account of p>0.05,while teaching years,academic qualification and professional title have significant correlations between junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy.(3)Based on the quantitative research,the interviews with four teachers reveal that factors influencing junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy include school atmosphere and job satisfaction.What’s more,subtle differences are existed in the mean value of teachers’ self-efficacy although the results of the study did not show any significant difference in junior high school English teachers’ self-efficacy with gender according to the independent sample t-test.More concretely,the mean value of female teachers’ self-efficacy is slightly higher than male teachers in each dimension.On the basis of the study,some pedagogical implications are put forward to promote the professional development of English teachers,which has a certain reference value for promoting the reform of junior high school English teaching and improving the quality of English teaching in junior high school.