Examining the role of self-efficacy and teacher autonomy on the digital competence of the secondary school EFL teachers

Integrating digital tools and utilizing digital resources into classes are a must for today's teaching process. Based on the review of the current research on digital competence, it can be concluded that technological developments in all walks of life are influential in education as the more digitized the society is, the more demand requires for educators to keep up with the digital era. Since teachers' beliefs may have a significant impact on their teaching, digital competence levels of teachers and self efficacy and teacher autonomy require to be examined as a whole. In this respect, this study focuses on finding the relation among digital competence of secondary school EFL teachers and their self-efficacy, autonomy to identify which one predicts the others to what extent. This study follows a quantitative research method and a correlational research design, with data collected through an online questionnaire employing scales from scales of DIGIGLO Tool (Alarcón, Jimenez and Vicente-Yagüe, 2020), Teacher Efficacy scale (Hoy and Woolfolk, 1993), and Teacher Autonomy scale (Pearson and Moomaw, 2006). Convenience sampling was utilized to recruit the participants, and 301 EFL teachers working at secondary schools in Turkish context made up of the participants. A number of validity and reliability tests was conducted to assess whether data was suitable for the analysis. Later, Pearson correlation analysis, and multiple regression analysis were performed for analyzing the collected data. The findings revealed that there is a moderately positive and statistically significant relationship between eight factors of digital competence, and self-efficacy. Additionally, there are low to moderately positive relationships among sub-factors of digital competence and teacher autonomy, and of self-efficacy and sub-factors of teacher autonomy. All of these findings were discussed in the study in detail, and implications were provided for teachers, headmasters and authorities, and researchers.