Abstract
The present study investigates the predicting effects of pre-service teacher identity and five personality traits ( extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism , and openness to experience ) on teacher self-efficacy among pre-service teachers of English as a foreign language. It was conducted at a state university in Turkey at the spring term of 2015-2016 academic year. A total of 155 students (sophomore N = 77; junior N = 78) participated in the study. In order to measure early teacher identity level of participants, Early Teacher Identity Measure (Friesen & Besley, 2013) was employed. Personality traits were measured by Quick Big Five Inventory (Vermulst & Gerris, 2005) while Teachers’ Sense of Self-efficacy scale (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk-Hoy, 2001) was used to find out participants’ self- efficacy in terms of their student engagement, instructional strategies, and classroom management strategies. Pearson correlation coefficients revealed that each variable has positive correlations with each other. Standard multiple regression analysis indicated that early teacher identity was the best predictor for teacher self-efficacy ( β = .486, t = 6.856, p < .001) which was followed by openness to experience ( β = .288, t = 4.296, p < .001). As the various individual differences were seen to have interrelations in the development of teaching skills, the study concludes that individual differences may help pre-service teachers to acquire one of the most important components of being a teacher: teacher-self-efficacy.
Highlights
Teacher self-efficacy is one of the important issues in teacher development as it is a teacher’s personal belief to cope with teaching tasks
In line with the aims of the present study, levels of interrelations between pre-service teacher identity, personality traits, and teacher self-efficacy indicate that the relationship that we hypothesized based on the theory is supported statistically with these results
It is clearly seen that early teacher identity has a higher correlation with teacher self-efficacy than five personality traits
Summary
Teacher self-efficacy is one of the important issues in teacher development as it is a teacher’s personal belief to cope with teaching tasks If they have question marks about their beliefs, their professional development process may be interrupted. As the various individual differences were seen to have interrelations in the development of teaching skills, it was thought that investigating individual differences may help pre-service teachers to acquire one of the most important components of being a teacher: teacher-self-efficacy. With this idea, the present study aims to contribute to the existing literature by investigating on the contexts of teacher self-efficacy, pre-service teacher identity, and personality traits
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