An Investigation of Prospective Teachers’ and Teacher Trainers’ 21st Century Skills Awareness

Abstract

This study aims to investigate prospective teachers of English’ (PTE) and teacher trainers of English’ (TTE) 21st century skills awareness levels, and to examine participants’ perceptions on their 21st century skills awareness. It was carried out in a mixed method research design, and it was conducted with 167 3rd and 4th-grade PTEs studying in Necmettin Erbakan University Department of English Language Teaching (ELT) in the 2022-2023 academic year, and 8 (all) TTEs working in Necmettin Erbakan University department of ELT. ‘21st Century Skills Efficiency Perceptions Scale for Teacher Candidates’ was used to collect the quantitative data and a semi-structured interview was used to collect the qualitative data of this research study. Interviews were conducted online with 20 purposefully selected prospective teachers of English and 4 randomly selected teacher trainers of English. The quantitative data were analysed using the SPSS 26.0 package program while the qualitative data were analysed using the content analysis method. Quantitative results showed that the 21st century skills awareness levels of PTEs and TTEs were moderate. The qualitative results showed that the PTEs think having 21st century skills is important, the most effective skill in ELT is communication, they mostly consider themselves sufficient, and they improve themselves mostly in social environments; besides, TTEs think having 21st century skills is important, the most effective skill in ELT is critical thinking, half of them consider themselves sufficient while the other half consider themselves in need of improvement, and they improve themselves mostly by attending vocational training and reading.

Keywords

• 21. yüzyıl
• farkındalık
• i̇ngilizce öğretmen adayları
• i̇ngilizce öğretmeni eğiticileri
• 21st century skills
• awareness
• prospective teachers of english (pte)
• teacher trainers of english (tte)