教員著作紹介コメント(Riswanda Setiadi先生)

Riswanda Setiadi先生(教育開発国際協力研究センター)よりご著書の紹介コメントをいただきました。(2010/07/21)

【本の情報】
『Self-efficacy in Indonesian literacy teaching context : a theoretical and empirical perspective』  Riswanda Setiadi, Bachrudin Musthafa. Rizqi Press , 2010【分類372.24-Se92】

【コメント】
This book presents theoretical views of self-efficacy and literacy as an effort to understand the significance of self-efficacy and its relation to literacy teachers’ performance in Indonesia. It does not provide readers with a thorough discussion of self-efficacy, but only invites them to further explore it in order to better understand how self-efficacy works in encouraging teachers to perform well. The relation between self-efficacy and literacy teaching is superficially discussed. In fact, self-efficacy is actually a broad concept, which can be connected with many other variables. In many respects, it is influential despite its invisibility.

Literacy is also a broad concept. It is not only about reading and writing as it was defined in the past. In its further development, it is defined to include a variety of literacy activities and becomes more complex and complicated in practice. The book highlights the importance of literacy and describes different genres of literacy to enrich and broaden readers’ knowledge of the current conception of literacy. However, it puts more emphasis on the discussion of reading and writing as the main components of literacy practice. Furthermore, it provides the readers with information about literacy teaching in Indonesia, but the readers are advised to continually update your information due to current development of literacy teaching in the country.

The discussion of research findings presented in this book surprisingly reveals the fact that teacher self-efficacy that has been believed to be an influential and powerful factor of teaching practices in Western context has not indicated its strong link with student literacy achievement in Indonesian context. It is an interesting part of the book the readers can find. Whether this is a viable option in Indonesia and other Eastern cultures should be the object of future research. It means that other researchers are encouraged to prove that self-efficacy is not the most significant contributor to teaching and learning performances, but it is worth considering in an attempt to better understand what the teachers think and do in relation to their teaching practices.

Once again, self-efficacy is influential but invisible. This book does not mean to drag the readers into the dark. It only tries to enlighten the way Albert Bandura has paved for us to better understand and to be familiar with the human functioning called self-efficacy. That is why statements or arguments presented in this book heavily rely on Bandura’s self-efficacy theory. However, I also owe other authors for their critical works on self-efficacy and literacy as I quote in this book.

So far I have been learning much from self-efficacy theories, and finally I have made myself self-efficacious enough in writing this book. This is not a special book, but readers are special for me because they may learn something special about Indonesia. Literacy teachers’ behaviors described briefly in Chapter 9 are expected to depict real circumstances of literacy teaching practices in Indonesia. Furthermore, the readers are expected to get a comparative experience. I invite university lecturers, students, and literacy teachers to make this book your perusal.