Some contextual factors weaken teachers’ self-efficacy. Webb and Ashton (1987) in a teacher interview found a number of factors that seemed to diminish teachers’ sense of efficacy. These included excessive role demands, poor collective morale, low status, inadequate salaries, and lack of identity recognition. Furthermore, in-field professional isolation, job uncertainty and relationship alienation also tended to weaken teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Other studies (Ross, Cousins, & Gadalla, 1996) found that teachers working with students of different ages tend to perceive varied levels of self-efficacy as well.
In school settings, the leadership of the principal would also change teachers’
self-efficacy. The better a principal can inspire a common sense of purpose among teachers and keep students’ disorder to a minimum level, the higher the teachers perceive self-efficacy. In addition, principals who utilize their leadership to supply resources to teachers and help teachers with disruptive factors but allow teachers’
flexibility over classroom affairs would create such a school atmosphere that permits strong teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs to grow. Finally, teachers’ self-efficacy tends to be higher when the principal of a school can model proper behaviors and provide rewards depending on teachers’ performance (Hipp & Bredeson, 1995; Lee et al., 1991).
Teachers’ self-efficacy is influenced by school atmosphere as well. The fact that whether a teacher can participate in the decision-making which concerns his/her
18
work lives or not would affect his/her sense of efficacy. The greater freedom teachers have in terms of decision-making of their own classroom, the higher their sense of efficacy grows. Teachers who judge that they have greater say in
school-based decision making and who sense fewer impediments to teaching would have a stronger sense of efficacy (Moore & Esselman, 1992). In addition, teachers tend to be more satisfied when they perceive other people in their work environment as trustworthy, benevolent, reliable, competent, honest, and open (Forsyth et al., 2011; Hoy & Tschannen-Moran, 1999).
When it comes to the relationship between years of teaching and teachers’
self-efficacy level, the research results are inconsistent. That is, teachers with varied years of teaching perceive different levels of self-efficacy under diverse schools and subject contexts. Novice teachers who received more support at the end of the first year evidenced stronger self-efficacy beliefs (Burley, Hall, Villeme, & Brockmeier, 1991; Hall, Burley, Villeme, & Brockmeir, 1992; to name but a few). However, Chester and Beaudin’s study (1996) in an urban district revealed that experienced teachers’ self-efficacy declined in the first year of teaching under that context.
Another factor that caused efficacy discrepancies among novice teachers and experienced teachers is the availabilities of resources. Novice teachers placed heavier emphasis on teaching resources, while experienced teachers’ judgments of their ability to help students’ learning were not significantly related to the
availability of resources in the teaching context (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2007).
Again, the discrepancy among the studies ascertains the importance of varied school settings.
As for school location, it would be common to think that urban school settings are more challenging than suburban or rural teaching environments; subsequently,
19
teachers in urban settings would be expected to have lower self-efficacy. However, in some study (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2007), the efficacy beliefs of urban teachers do not differ from those of teachers in other contexts.
Teaching level (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2007), which means teaching at different educational institutes, bears different weight to teachers’ self-efficacy among novice and experienced teachers as well. The experienced teachers, who perceived higher self-efficacy, are those who taught the youngest children; however, different ages’ students taught at the same school made no difference to novice teachers. In the same study, the support of parents and the community was related to career teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, but these variables did not make a significant contribution to explaining teachers’ sense of efficacy. On comparison, the support of colleagues and of the community contributed more significantly to explaining variance in novice teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs than in experienced teachers’. It seems that experienced teachers have adapted to the typical isolation of their work lives and have learned to base their efficacy judgments on other sources.
In the same research (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2007), demographic variables such as race and gender were not found to be systematically related to the
self-efficacy beliefs of either novice or career teachers. Demographic variables have typically not been strong predictors of the efficacy beliefs of teachers. These
variables were included as controls so as to rule out their suspect to influence teachers’ self-efficacy.
More research into the important sources of efficacy information would be of great value as we attempt to learn how to better train and equip teachers for their complex tasks. In this light, this study focused on the EFL domain, where not enough research has been made, to explore what factors affected EFL primary
20
teachers’ self-efficacy. More important, the abovementioned literatures were mainly studies concerning native speakers’ research; the studies under the context of non-native EFL teachers like the current one were still very scarce. That was one of the incentives that propelled the researcher to do this study.