Addressing the impact of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs on the integration of ELF-aware practices.

The rise of English as a lingua franca (ELF), a means of communication between people who do not share the same mother tongue, has prompted a shift from traditional teaching to ELF-aware teaching. For teachers to act as potential agents of change, their self-efficacy beliefs become a determining variable for the successful implementation of change in class. This paper aims to address the role that teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs play in determining their decision-making to adopt ELF-aware teaching practices. A total of 951 Greek teachers of English responded to a questionnaire whose purpose was twofold: (i) to check if English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers incorporate practices that are compatible with the ELF perspective, and (ii) to uncover if higher-level self-efficacy beliefs on classroom management, student engagement, and instructional strategies would entice them to adopt ELF-aware practices in their classes. With the help of statistical tools, we found 10 items that form an ELF index, a unidimensional scale that is associated with ELF-aware teaching approaches. Our analysis shows that higher levels of teachers’ self-efficacy are indeed associated with higher values on the ELF index. However, it seems that significant variations emerge when emphasis is placed on the extent to which each of the three dimensions of self-efficacy affects the ELF index. This finding bears implications for the steps needed to be taken towards enhancing teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs that would lead to the implementation of ELF-aware teaching approaches in their EFL classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]