Prospective English Language Teachers' Self-Efficacy Beliefs Towards Acquiring Language Skills: A Scale Development Study

The objective of this study is to develop a measurement tool to evaluate the self-efficacy beliefs of pre-service English language teachers in relation to acquiring language skills. To this end, a comprehensive literature review was conducted, and an item pool was compiled through the consultation of experts. A draft scale form comprising 126 items was created by following the scale development stages as determined by a review of the literature. The items were submitted to expert opinions and transformed into a scale form with five Likert-style options. The developed scale was applied as a pilot study to 262 students studying in the 3rd and 4th grades of English Language Teaching departments of state universities in Ankara in the 2024-2025 academic year. Following the execution of an exploratory factor analysis on the data obtained from the pilot application of the scale developed for the purpose of assessing construct validity, it was determined that the scale in question consists of 55 items and seven sub-dimensions. The scale, with its 55 items and seven sub-dimensions, accounts for a total variance of 64,960%. The independent samples t-test results used to determine the discrimination of each item in the scale were significant (p≤.01). In addition, the Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient of the developed scale was found to be 0.977. The reliability level for the listening sub-dimension is 0.946; the reliability level for the listening knowledge sub-dimension is 0.715; the reliability level for the writing sub-dimension is 0.910; the reliability level for the writing structure sub-dimension The reliability level for the reading comprehension sub-dimension is 0.831; the reliability level for the reading knowledge sub-dimension is 0.913; the reliability level for the speaking sub-dimension is 0.932.The results of the statistical analyses show that the Self-Efficacy Belief Scale for Acquiring Language Skills is a scale with the necessary psychometric properties.