Investigating EFL secondary stage teachers’ perceptions and instructional practices of 21st century skills based on some demographic characteristics

The primary aim of this study was to explore EFL teachers’ perceptions and teaching practices related to 21st century skills and reveal whether there are differences in their perceptions in terms of some demographic characteristics (i.e. gender, years of experience and school type). To illustrate, the targets of the study were to find out (1) how teachers perceive some skills, namely critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, self-directedness and digital literacy, (2) how often they develop these skills and (3) whether these perceptions significantly differ in terms of the demographic characteristics mentioned above. Methodologically, this mixed-methods study included quantitative and qualitative data collection instruments (a multi-section questionnaire and reflective journals). A group of in-service EFL secondary school teachers (N=130) agreed to take part in the study. The results showed that athough the majority of the participants demonstrated positive perceptions toward the skills, their teaching practices were still poor. This means that inconsistency was found between how they perceived the skills and how often they taught them. The communication skill was the most frequently integrated skill, while the self-directedness skill was the least one. Moreover, statistical analyses showed significant differences between teachers’ perceptions of 21st century skills based on demographic characteristics. This indicated that future in-service training programs should put those characteristics into consideration. Qualitative analyses of teachers’ reflective journals provided more evidence for their need for training on how to properly integrate the skills in secondary school EFL classrooms