A Study Of Middle School Novice English Teachers' Pedagogical Content Knowledge And Self-efficacy

As the key components of teacher professional development,pedagogical content knowledge(PCK)and teachers' self-efficacy(TSE)have certain significant influence on teachers' internal factors.These key factors determine how teachers judge their teaching ability,and how this judgment regulates teachers' knowledge and teaching behavior.With the deepening of teacher research,pedagogical content knowledge and teachers' self-efficacy have increasingly become hot issues in the fields of psychology as well as language education.Though a huge number of studies have examined the components,contributing factors and influence of pedagogical content knowledge and teachers' self-efficacy,for teachers themselves,the focus of previous research has been mainly on the comparison between novice teachers and expert teachers in the past decade,and few studies have been conducted to investigate middle school novice English teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and teachers' self-efficacy in China.This study,therefore,aimed at exploring the pedagogical content knowledge and teachers' self-efficacy of middle school novice English teachers in Yunnan Province,and examining the factors that might be related to pedagogical content knowledge and the relationship between teachers' self-efficacy and demographic variables such as years of teaching,teaching department,and professional attitudes.By means of adopting quantitative and qualitative methods,227 novice teachers in middle schools were enrolled to complete the questionnaire,and 5 of them were interviewed.After the collection of data from questionnaires and interviews,SPSS 22.0 software was used to execute data description,correlation analysis and liner regression analysis of the questionnaire.Based on the analysis of the questionnaire and interview data,the main findings have shown that: 1)the overall PCK level of novice teachers was at a medium level(M=3.88,out of 5),and their mastery of PCK ranked from high to low as follows:English content knowledge,knowledge of self-reflection,knowledge of pedagogy,conceptions of purposes for teaching,knowledge of context,knowledge of students,indicating that novice English teachers had difficulties in understanding students;2)the factors that were related to the development of PCK revealed that teachers' years of teaching experience was the key factor that had an impact on knowledge ofstudents.Professional attitude was also the vital factor to help make a distinction between different teachers' level of PCK and its six categories,and the level of attitude was actually in proportion to PCK;3)novice English teachers' self-efficacy was at a medium level(M=3.85,out of 5).Novice teachers were more efficacious in instructional strategies,and they perceived a lower level of efficacy in classroom management than instructional strategies and student engagement;4)there was significant correlation between TSE and demographic variables such as years of teaching,teaching department and professional attitudes.Specifically,there was a positive relationship between years of teaching and TSE regarding classroom management.In addition,teaching department was related to TSE on student engagement.Professional attitude plays an important role in the overall level of TSE;5)the PCK level of novice teachers had a positive predictive effect on their TSE.In other words,PCK could account for a large part of TSE variables.The study contributes to a better understanding of middle schools novice English teachers' level of pedagogical content knowledge and teachers' self-efficacy.It also demystifies the knowledge that novice teachers have to increase.The findings may shed light on pre-service English language teacher education programme.