ABSTRACT
With the abrupt and ill-prepared transition to online education in the second term of the 2019–2020 academic year, online language education was adopted in all universities in Türkiye. The public university of the study context started offering hybrid education: traditional face-to-face teaching with the curriculum newly adapted to include digital education tools and flipped online grammar instruction. This fundamental transition required new ways of interacting with technology, encouraging students to adapt to unorthodox technology-rich L2 learning environments. It simultaneously impacted their language self-efficacy (LSE) beliefs as well as their technology-based self-regulated learning (SRL) strategy use. This study aims to explore the LSE beliefs and technology-based SRL strategy use of L2 learners. We need to understand the underlying construction of their LSE beliefs in order to encourage students to build more positive efficacy beliefs in today's rapidly digitalizing world. The study was conducted with 94 Turkish students. An exploratory sequential mixed method approach was implemented. The results indicated a modest but significant positive correlation between self-efficacy levels and technology-based SRL strategy use: learners with high levels of LSE tended to display more fully articulated metacognition, control, and knowledge of effective learning strategies. As for those with weak LSE beliefs, learners’ perceived incompetence was reported to stem from their previous negative mastery and vicarious experiences as well as limited oral and written input and practice, the inability to travel overseas mostly due to financial burdens, challenging personal educational backgrounds, and difficulty in vocabulary retrieval. Pedagogical implications are discussed.
