ESL Online Teaching: A Survey on Boarding School Teachers’ Efficacy and its Sources

Teachers’ efficacy is important in defining pupils’ performance, as it determines teachers’ efforts to conduct their lessons. Even though online teaching is not new in this 21st century, little research has been done to investigate teachers’ efficacy to teach online, as ICT integration was a choice before, leaving researchers to study teachers’ perceptions and predict their likeliness to use ICT in teaching. However, the need to assess teachers’ online teaching efficacy became pertinent during pandemic as it was the only teaching mode available due to national lockdown. Since efficacy is domain and context specific, this study aimed to assess the level of efficacy and the sources of efficacy among the under-researched population, the boarding school ESL teachers, as a lot of research has focused on STEM subjects and daily school teachers. 252 boarding school ESL teachers were simply randomly selected to answer the e-questionnaire distributed through their schools nationwide. It was found that they had high efficacy in teaching online and rated vicarious experience, enactive mastery experience, and verbal or social persuasion as the main factors that influenced their efficacy. On top of that, vicarious experience was statistically proven to have a 50.1% contribution to the sample’s efficacy. This finding provides valuable insights for us, particularly the authorities, on how to better support our teachers in the future while we prepare our pupils with 21st-century skills.