Efficacy Beliefs and Metacognitive Awareness in English Language Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract

Teacher self-efficacy and metacognitive awareness could be regarded as significant in teaching and teacher education due to psychological and cognitive aspects of them which are directly linked to quality of teaching since 21st century skills which involve elaborate use of cognitive skills also necessitate teachers having those skills as well, which is part of metacognitive awareness. Thus, this paper presents findings of a mixed-method study that has been conducted with pre-service (N=97) and in-service (N=53) English language teachers on their perceived levels of teacher self-efficacy and metacognitive awareness and aimed to explore any similarities or differences between the two groups in the two variables taking into account that a comparison could reveal further issues to consider such as factor leading to them. For this purpose, teacher self-efficacy scale developed and validated by the researchers and Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (Schraw & Dennison, 1994) were administered to the participants and followed by semi-structured interviews focusing on in-depth analyses of quantitative data. The findings indicated that in-service teachers had higher levels of metacognitive awareness than pre-service teachers whereas levels of their teacher self-efficacy were not significantly different. Qualitative data, on the other hand, suggested a number of factors leading to that difference.