Sources of college EFL learners' self-efficacy in the English public speaking domain

The English language is playing an ever-increasing role in global cultural, political, and economic domains. This underscores a rapidly growing need for good English public speaking (EPS) skills among college students and a need to better understand instructionally manipulable factors, such as self-efficacy, that may contribute to EPS skills development. Grounded in Bandura's self-efficacy theory, this study investigated the degree to which four sources of self-efficacy enactive mastery experience (EME), vicarious experience (VE), verbal persuasion (VP), and physiological and affective states (PAS) predicted EPS self-efficacy among 263 adult Chinese English as a foreign language learners. The overall results in the combined sample largely support Bandura's hypothesized sources of self-efficacy, with EME, VE, and VP but not PAS significantly making unique contributions to predicting EPS self-efficacy. The results by subsample highlight prior EPS course experience, gender, and academic major as factors that may impact the existence and the magnitude of the relationship between self-efficacy and its theoretical sources. This is particularly important for educators who wish to foster their students' EPS self efficacy beliefs as the findings suggest that different groups of students may respond differently to their instructors' efforts. Pedagogical recommendations for EPS self-efficacy building are discussed. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.