Abstract

This study examined the predictability of EFL teachers’ self-efficacy on their motivational teaching behaviors. Participants involved 112 English teachers from China’s tertiary education institutes selected by a “snowball” sampling strategy and also from an EFL teacher training camp. They completed a questionnaire survey of the demographic information of participants, their perception of self-efficacy, and their motivational teaching behaviors in English classroom. Results from the descriptive statistics and a multiple regression analysis were generated based on the survey. It indicated that college EFL teachers perceived themselves with much higher self-efficacy for instructional strategies than efficacy for classroom management and efficacy for student engagement. Also, the results revealed that two most frequently used motivational strategies by teachers in language classroom were strategies for generating students’ initial motivation and strategies for maintaining and protecting students’ motivation. The results also showed that teachers’ self-efficacy significantly contributed to the prediction of teachers’ motivational teaching behaviors and accounted for more than one third of the variance to teachers’ motivational teaching behaviors. This study confirmed that there was a direct causal relationship between English teachers’ perceptions of their self-efficacy and their adoption of motivational strategies.

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