The relationship between teacher efficacy and technological pedagogical content knowledge within the scope of efl pre-service teachers

The present study aimed to investigate (a) perceptions of Turkish EFL pre-service teachers related to their overall teacher efficacy and its three sub-scales: student engagement, classroom management, and instructional strategies; (b) level of their Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK); and, (c) the relationship between levels of teacher efficacy and TPACK of Turkish pre-service teachers of English language. Involving the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, "Data Triangulation" was employed in this study. The research was carried out in the contexts of English Language Teaching in Educational Faculties in Anadolu University, Marmara University, Yıldız Technical University, and Yeditepe University in 2013-2014 Spring Term. A total of 110 fourth-year students in these universities responded to all of the questions in the instruments. Data were collected through 3 main instruments: (1) English Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale to gather information related to their understanding of their efficacy levels (Chacon, 2005); (2) TPACK-Deep Scale for gaining information about combining technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge in the ways of both learning and teaching processes (Kabakçı-Yurdakul, Odabaşı, Kılıçer, Çoklar, Birinci, and Kurt in 2012); and (3) Open-ended questions to assess their self-report of how efficaciously they integrate and use technology in their teaching experiences during the last part of their undergraduate studies. Additionally, "Teacher's Background Information" part was also used in order to detect the participants' technology use in English language teaching in a more detailed way. Quantitative data were analysed by descriptive statistics including frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation, correlation analysis, and bivariate regression methods; and, qualitative data were analysed with constant comparison method. The findings of the analysis of descriptive statistics indicated high levels of teacher efficacy beliefs of the Turkish EFL pre-service teachers. Additionally, the participants reported to have high levels of TPACK. Furthermore, correlation analysis demonstrated a meaningful relationship between overall teacher efficacy and TPACK competence. As for the further analysis, the results of regression analysis showed that TPACK has an influence on all three sub-scales of teacher efficacy which are "Student Engagement", "Classroom Management", and "Instructional Strategies". The results of the open-ended questions also supported the relationship between TPACK and teacher efficacy. Thus, quantitative data results were supported with qualitative data. As it was carried out to reveal the relationship between teacher efficacy and TPACK for the first time, this study proved to have valuable contributions in order to improve training process of Turkish EFL pre-service teachers. At the end of the study, there are some implications for educators and educational researchers.