Differences in self-efficacy beliefs of foreign language teachers in Turkey

One of the most important factors which shape the society now and in the future, lead us in our lives and affect us as individuals is education. While success of educational processes depends on the students and their personal characteristics, efforts, motivation teachers have a bigger impact on general concept of success. Thus teachers have to be able to modernize themselves and obtain all the necessary knowledge and skill sets of the 21st century. The role of teachers in language education has more importance as a new culture and possibility to construct a new identity is present in the classroom. Because of this it is even more crucial that teachers have the necessary competences. Teachers having all of the desired competences will prove unity in reaching the education goals. Under light of these facts possible differences of required self-efficacy concepts between foreign language teachers in Turkey are examined and differences are given. A data gathering tool consisting of questions about personal information, generalised self-efficacy and teacher self-efficacy was given to 151 foreign language teachers and results are gathered and analysed. Research shows that teachers of Turkish as a foreign language have higher self-efficacy beliefs than English teachers and they have higher self-efficacy beliefs if they are opposed and they can still reach their goals. It is noted that female foreign language teachers have higher teacher self-efficacy levels than male teachers and also that male teachers have higher efficacy levels for sub-categories of knowing what to do in unexpected situations and being able to find the means to reach their goals when opposed. Teachers who are between 21 and 35 years of age show higher teacher self-efficacy levels and they also have higher self-efficacy levels in terms of coping with administrative problems, knowing how to act in unforeseen events and achieving their personal goals. According to the results a significant difference of self-efficacy beliefs between the foreign language teachers can be seen depending on their degree departments. Teachers who graduated from departments such as Language and Literature, Translation, Linguistics show higher levels of self-efficacy. Research findings show that teachers who teach their native languages as a foreign language have higher self-efficacy beliefs. Another factor which has an effect on self-efficacy beliefs is total experience in teaching. Results point out that teachers with more experience have higher teacher self-efficacy. A positive correlation between self-efficacy and teacher self-efficacy was also found. Lastly as their level of education progresses foreign language teachers show higher teacher self-efficacy beliefs. As a result it is seen that there's a significant difference between self-efficacy beliefs of foreign language teachers in Turkey depending on the language taught, their age, sex, degree department they graduated from, whether the language taught is the native language of the teacher, total experience in teaching and their level of education. Keywords: self-efficacy, teacher self-efficacy, foreign language teaching, 21st century skills, teacher training.