Early Childhood Teachers’ Self-Efficacy for Teaching English

Prof. Ali Kemal Tekin, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway;    

Abstract: The current trend in education in early years suggests a holistic perspective and considers the individual learner as the whole child, in turn, mandates broad and wide-ranging educational programs and curricula to meet the needs of the “whole child”. Parents are more interested in having their children acquire English language skills as early as possible because they see the demands of the globalizing world context and contemporary trends in society and wish to ensure that their children can live in a future society. Multilingualism, or at least bilingualism, has been a more relevant phenomenon in today’s internationalized lives. Teaching and learning language have been a focus in the field of early childhood education (ECE) for decades. As many skills are earned during the early years, teaching and learning English during that period also gained critical momentum despite several critiques trying to reserve early childhood years for more non-academic curricula. Hence, English has been a significant subject that made its place in the ECE curriculum in many countries. But the most important variable in teaching and learning has always been the teacher. Thus, the question here is whether the ECE teachers are competent to fulfil this task. To understand this, one should first know if teachers really believe in their capacity to execute behaviours and deploy skills to teach English to young children in their classrooms. Thus, this study investigated the adapted version of the Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Scale (TSES) along with the background survey that was deployed to collect the data from 175 schools in the Muscat area. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the results by using SPSS.  The results are shared for; (1) the level of ECE teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching English, (2) the relationship between the participants’ backgrounds such as their educational level, age, years of teaching experience, types of previous and current teaching experience according to grade levels and their efficacy levels of teaching English. Implications are made for policy, practice, and further research.

Keywords: Early Childhood Education, Teaching English, Teachers’ Self-Efficacy, Bilingualism, EFL for Young Children