Exploring Language Teacher Efficacy in Japan - Gene Thompson Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching

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Yakudoku This term literally means ‘translation through reading’, and refers to grammar-translation methodology with a long history of use in Japan.

      Gene Thompson is an associate professor of language and communication in the College of Business at Rikkyo University, Japan. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Education from Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He also has a postgraduate diploma in Second Language Teaching and a masters in Applied Linguistics from the University of Waikato, New Zealand.

      His research on language learner and teacher cognitions started from his involvement as a teacher educator in Hiroshima, where he worked with pre-service elementary school teachers and consulted for city and prefectural boards of education. Gene continues to examine learner and teacher cognitions about language learning.

      This is Gene’s first book. He has published in international journals such as Studies in Higher Education, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. He maintains an interest in the teaching of English as an international language, and has co-authored a number of entries in the TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. He has also co-authored a chapter focused on translation fidelity for multilingual data collection and analysis in The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics.

      The research reported in this book could not have been carried out without the help of many busy English teachers across Japan, who kindly volunteered their time to participate in the studies reported in this book.

      As much of the work reported in this book is derived from collaborative research efforts, I wish to thank Karen Woodman, Karen Dooley, Rebecca Spooner-Lane and Mayuno Yanagita for their contributions to the research presented here.

      I also wish to thank the series editors Sarah Mercer and Stephen Ryan, who gave me valuable feedback and helped make this book more readable.

      Finally, thank you to Mayuko and Alec, for putting up with me.

      This book introduces readers to the developing field of language teacher efficacy (LTE) research. Teacher efficacy has been extensively studied within the wider field of education; however, it has received less attention within the field of applied linguistics. This book helps readers to locate language teacher efficacy within the field of teacher efficacy research, and focuses on the Japanese high school language teaching context. It discusses personal and collective dimensions of language teacher efficacy related to personal second language (L2) capability, instructional L2 efficacy and collective capability towards collaboration. This book presents previously unpublished research exploring the factors that influence language teacher efficacy, with discussion about the ways in which these beliefs develop.

      Teacher efficacy is discussed in this book as a type of self-efficacy, and refers to the self-beliefs of teachers about their perceived capability to execute actions and achieve valued teaching outcomes, via personal and collective effort (Bandura, 1997, 2006). A variety of terms have been used in the applied linguistics research literature to refer to the self-efficacy for teaching beliefs of language teachers, such as teaching self-efficacy (e.g. Hiver, 2013), English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher self-efficacy (e.g. Hoang, 2018), language teacher self-efficacy (e.g. Wyatt, 2018b) and EFL teacher collective efficacy (e.g. Göker, 2012). This book uses the term language teacher efficacy (LTE) as it aligns with the use of the term ‘teacher efficacy’ to refer to teacher self-efficacy beliefs in the wider fields of education and psychology; can be used to discuss efficacy as individual or collective beliefs; and can be applied to a variety of language teaching contexts (e.g. English as a second language [ESL], EFL and the teaching of languages other than English).

      My Interest in Language Teacher Efficacy

      This book, and the research presented here, came about from my experience as a teacher educator in Japan, during a period of curriculum reform that mandated L2-speaking teachers, at the high school level, to use English as the primary language for carrying out their classes. As a contributor to teacher training workshops, I met many highly motivated teachers giving up their weekends to attend seminars and attempt to learn useful new teaching strategies in preparation for the new curriculum. However, I also met teachers – many of whom were forced to attend such workshops – who were the opposite.

      I began to see a difference in the respective ‘confidence’ of teachers towards the different teaching tasks that the new curriculum guidelines encouraged. I began to wonder how confident are they about using English to teach? How confident are they about developing new activities? How can I further investigate confidence towards different teaching tasks?

      My focus on teacher ‘confidence’ further developed out of a collaborative project I carried out with a high school Japanese teacher of English (JTE) during the early 2010s (see Thompson & Yanagita, 2017). The teacher was struggling to understand exactly how to apply communicative language teaching (CLT) in her classes, and as noted in other studies (Cook, 2009; Underwood, 2012), she faced resistance towards implementing change in materials design and teaching from her colleagues, who preferred to rely on the grammar-translation teaching method called yakudoku. The teacher asked me to work with her as a mentor, and from my participant-observer status, I became interested in the change in her ‘confidence’ over the course of the project, as I learned about the broader teaching environment within which she worked.

      I surveyed the teacher cognition literature in order to identify a theoretical construct that specifically discussed the interaction between teachers’ perceptions of confidence, their teaching behaviour and how these were dynamically influenced by the contexts that they worked within. As a result, I developed an interest in language teacher efficacy, which I define as the beliefs that teachers have about their perceived capability to organise and carry out courses of action in order to effectively support the development of student L2 language ability.

      As Bandura (1997) has explained, feelings about experience (i.e. affective states) help shape and determine beliefs, and teacher self-beliefs have been argued as key mediators of teacher behaviour (Borg, 2003, 2006). Given the dynamic relationship between affect, beliefs and practice, the teacher efficacy research reported in this book grew out of a desire to explore what influenced JTEs’ self-beliefs about their capability to effectively teach English in their classrooms.

      Overview of the Book

      This book discusses findings from a sequential mixed method study of the self-efficacy for teaching beliefs of Japanese high school English language teachers. Certain chapters may be of more interest to different readers, and accordingly each is written in such a way that readers can visit and draw on different chapters without needing to read the entire book. I know that I seldom read a research book in full, and certainly not in one sitting, thus I have attempted to write this book as a series of integrated chapters that do not necessarily require the reader to read each page of each chapter.

      The book has 11 chapters. The first chapter introduces the reader to the context of the study, including the background of the research discussed in this book, contextual features of the Japanese language teaching environment and how this study of language teacher efficacy developed from an interest in language teacher ‘confidence’ towards the use of the L2 for language instruction.

      Chapter 2 introduces readers to teacher efficacy within the theoretical framework of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1997, 2006) by tracing a brief history of teacher efficacy research, discussing the theoretical basis of efficacy beliefs as mediators of behaviour and considering the sources and assessment of efficacy beliefs. Chapter 3 then focuses specifically on language teacher efficacy beliefs, and further discusses the ideas raised in Chapter 2 by focusing on research carried out within the

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