ABSTRACT
Language teachers’ self-efficacy (LTSE) beliefs encompass the many ways in which language teachers view their own capabilities to support language learning. Importantly, these means are task-, domain-, and context-specific, interacting with language teachers’ beliefs about their own language proficiency and their own language awareness. To date, there has been extensive research into LTSE beliefs and teacher cognition more generally, but specific language domains such as vocabulary have not received due attention. To help address this gap, this chapter reports on a mixed-methods investigation of LTSE beliefs about teaching vocabulary and the relationship of these beliefs to lexical awareness. Quantitative data were collected through an online survey and were supplemented with qualitative data from semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that confidence in presenting/practising vocabulary and what we termed “responsively using teacher lexical knowledge” were the greatest predictors of overall vocabulary teaching confidence. Other trends that emerged related to beliefs about pre-teaching vocabulary, beliefs about using learners’ first language, and teachers’ awareness of multi-word lexical items. These findings have implications for teacher preparation, suggesting aspects of vocabulary instruction which may be currently underserved, uncovering characteristics of confident vocabulary teachers that can be emulated, and highlighting issues in vocabulary instruction which remain controversial.
