Belgian CLIL teachers’ professional identity: the role of self-efficacy.

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a generic term referring to a teaching approach whereby content is taught through a second or foreign language. For Belgian teachers entering the CLIL classroom, this dual-focused approach is a challenge, since they are either trained as content or language experts. This demands a professional (re)orientation which current teacher training programs in Belgium do not yet offer. How CLIL teachers interpret this multiple role and how they deal with it in practice, constitutes their professional identity. Research has shown that teachers’ perceptions of their own professional identity strongly affect their sense of self-efficacy and professional development (Beijaard et al. 2004, Lamote & Engels 2010). Self-efficacy is regarded as a powerful construct related to teachers’ motivation and behavior in the classroom as well as contributing to important student outcomes (Tschannen-Moran et al. 1998). The aim of the present study is to contribute to understanding how CLIL-teachers perceive their professional experience in terms of self-efficacy, how they see their (multiple) roles and how they think they deal with it in practice. CLIL teachers’ efficacy beliefs were measured using the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (short version) (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy 2001). This multiple item scale assesses three dimensions of the underlying construct: sense of efficacy for instructional strategies, sense of efficacy for stimulating pupils’ involvement and sense of efficacy for classroom management. For the assessment of teachers’ sense of efficacy about CLIL instructional strategies, a 17-item survey was composed based on the European Framework for CLIL Teacher Education (Marsh et al. 2010) and an observation tool for effective L2 pedagogy in CLIL (de Graaff et al. 2007). The participants were Belgian secondary school CLIL-teachers (N=80). The results show that CLIL teachers attribute themselves moderately low scores for self-efficacy with regard to the general aspects of teaching, as opposed to moderately high scores for teachers’ efficacy with regard to specific aspects of CLIL teaching. As a positive linear correlation was found with the level of collegiality in the school context, it is suggested that opportunities for raising self-efficacy beliefs lie in helping school teams to function as professional collegial communities, working together in an atmosphere of joint responsibility (Andrews & Lewis 2002).