Multilingual Teacher Students’ Self-efficacy as Future Mathematics Teachers in a Second Language Classroom

The multilingual teacher program at the University of Agder is unique in a national perspective. It is the only Norwegian teacher education program tailored to students of a different mother tongue and a rich variety of cultural backgrounds. To get to know the 24 students, and to better understand their perspectives on learning and teaching mathematics, they were given a reflective questionnaire. Their responses to open-ended questions revealed aspects related to their self-efficacy as future mathematics teachers in Norwegian classrooms. In recent years, several quantitative studies exploring teacher self-efficacy have been conducted, but according to Xenofontos and Andrews (2020) there are few qualitative studies addressing conceptualization of self-efficacy in various contexts. Furthermore, the cultural and language dimensions related to self-efficacy is usually not addressed. This study contributes to the field of research by investigating multilingual teacher students’ perceptions of self-efficacy in the Norwegian mathematics classroom. For this group of teacher students, it is not sufficient to learn mathematics or how to teach mathematics. They also need to adapt to a different classroom culture and a language that is not their first language. Hence, this study adds essential dimensions to complement the theory of teacher self-efficacy.