The relationship between university efl teachers' teaching for social justice beliefs and their multicultural teaching competencies

The objective of this study is to investigate university EFL teachers' teaching for social justice beliefs, their multicultural teaching competence and possible relationship between these two phenomena. It is also aimed to make possible connections between demographic information of participants and the aforementioned subjects. In line with the study's objective, the participants consist of 102 university EFL teachers working at the universities chosen from Southeastern and Mediterranean regions of Turkey. The study data was gathered by three instruments: a demographic questionnaire, Learning to Teach for Social Justice-Beliefs (LTSJB) scale and Multicultural Teaching Competency scale (MTCS). Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) program was used to analyze the data collected by the online participation. Statistical tests such as descriptive statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA), independent sample t-test and Pearson's Correlation test were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that even though participants' multicultural teaching competencies seems to be on a high level, their beliefs on teaching for social justice remained lower than the compared literature studies. In addition, some of the demographic factors were found to make significant difference affecting participants both teaching for social justice beliefs and their multicultural teaching competencies. Finally, the study found out that there is a positive low correlation between teachers' teaching for social justice beliefs and their multicultural teaching competencies. In other words, it is found out that when teachers' commitment to teaching for social justice levels increase, their multicultural teaching competence levels increase accordingly.