Investigating Sources of Korean Middle School Students' Engish Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Objectives The purposes of the present study was to examine the levels of middle school students' English self-efficacy, and to investigate the relationships between four sources of self-efficacy(mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasion, physiological states) proposed by Bandura(1997) with Engish self-efficacy Methods The participants in this study were 285 middle school students from four different schools in Kyungnam province. Questionnaire was used to collect the data. The data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA. In order to examine how well the sources of self-efficacy would predict students' English self-efficacy, regression analysis was conducted. Results The results showed that the participants were in the level of moderate self-efficacy in learning English. There was no significant difference in the level of English self-efficacy with respect to gender and years of school. The sources of self-efficacy did not change depending on gender. Among four sources of self-efficacy, only phyological states signficantly changed depending on grade levels. All four self-efficacy sources were significantly correlated with the participants' English self-efficacy. Effects were strongest for mastery experience(β=.515), the second strongest for social persuasion(β=.305). Vicarious experience(β=.101) and physiological states(β=-.064) had relatively weaker effects. Conclusions The results indicated that the important sources of students' English self-efficacy were mastery experience and social persuasion. It means that mastery experience and social persuasion significanty predict students' English self-efficacy. More importantly, mastery experience was found to be the main predictor for English self-efficacy of students. Unlike the previous studies, social persuasion exceeded vicarious experience and physiological states in influencing the students' English self-efficacy. Results of the finidnings suggest the importance of teachers' roles in enhancing students' English self-efficacy.