English as a foreign language teachers' self-efficacy as a determinant of correspondence between their professed orientations toward reading and their reading instructional practices

Abstract

The correspondence/non-correspondence of teachers' beliefs and their instructional practices has recently gained wide recognition in language teaching research. The general conclusion from the line of research investigating this issue points to the fact that there is not always a necessary correspondence between what teachers state as their beliefs and what is actually reflected in their classroom practices. While different explanations have been proposed for this non-correspondence, personal variables have not received a fair share of treatment as explanatory factors. Therefore, the present study investigated how teacher sense of efficacy, as a personal variable, might affect English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' reading instructional orientations and their corresponding instructional practices. To this end, the theoretical reading instructional orientations and reading instructional practices of two groups of teachers – high-efficacy group and low-efficacy group – were investigated. Comparisons between the two groups revealed that while both groups reported having approximately the same theoretical orientations toward reading, there were significant differences between them in their reading instructional practices and, consequently, the correspondence between their orientations and instructional practices.