A Study On The Influence Of Teaching Practicum On Pre-service English Teachers' Classroom Management Self-efficacy

Teachers' self-efficacy has been discussed by an impressive body of research at home and abroad in recent years.As teachers' perception of their own abilities,teachers'sense of efficacy is closely related to their teaching performance and students' learning achievements.Teachers' classroom management self-efficacy(CMSE)is proposed as a domain-specific area within teacher self-efficacy.As the embodiment of teachers'efficacy in classroom management area,it has been proved to have correlation with teachers' maintenance of favorable behavior and instructional quality.However,most existing studies explore in-service teachers' general efficacy without paying special attention to this domain-specific form of efficacy.Besides,pre-service teachers are less frequently examined in the bulk of research carried upon self-efficacy.Unlike in-service teachers,pre-service teachers are required to take part in teaching practicum before their service,which allows them to face real classroom teaching and offers them opportunity to recast efficacy beliefs of classroom management.This study takes fifty-three postgraduates from M.Ed.program in Central China Normal University as the research participants,aiming to explore the changes of pre-service English teachers' CMSE after teaching practicum and to further analyze possible factors that result in the changes through questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews.The questionnaires were distributed before and after the practicum respectively and the obtained data were analyzed using SPSS software.Then six participants from different practicum schools were selected for face-to-face interview as a complement of quantitative data.The following three questions are to be answered:(1)What are the levels of pre-service English teachers' CMSE before and after teaching practicum?(2)What is the influence of teaching practicum on pre-service English teachers'CMSE?(3)What are the factors that influence pre-service English teachers' CMSE during teaching practicum?The findings are as follows:(1)Pre-service English teachers have a moderate level of CMSE before practicum and a high level of CMSE after practicum.Both before and after teaching practicum,pre-service English teachers' self-efficacy level is the highest in classroom relationships management,followed by instruction management and physical arrangement of classroom,while behavior management and time management are their weakest part.(2)Teaching practicum has positively affected pre-service English teachers' overall CMSE to a great extent.Concerning the sub-dimensions,the growth of their efficacy in instruction management,time management and behavior management is obvious,while that in physical arrangement of classroom and relationship management is rather minor.(3)During the practicum,the factors influencing pre-service English teachers CMSE are mainly related to mentor,students,peers and themselves,such as the feedback and support of the mentor,the students' classroom participation and evaluation,peer relationship and collaboration as well as their personal efforts.