Linguistically responsive teaching competence, teacher self-efficacy, and opportunities to learn—a pre-post study on the effects of a university course on the development of pre-service teachers’ competences

Linguistically responsive subject teaching is the key to pupils’ academic success, but teachers still do not feel adequately prepared for this teaching approach. The seminar “Approaches to language education for subject teaching” is an innovative and interdisciplinary course at the University of Hamburg, which aims at sensitizing pre-service teachers to linguistically responsive teaching (LRT) methods. It is part of the internship module of the Master’s degree. In the summer term of 2022, data was collected from 490 course participants in a pre-post design to investigate the effectiveness of the seminar. Data collection comprised a test on competences in LRT (DaZKom-Test, Hammer et al. 2015) as a cognitive competence facet, a scale on teachers’ self-efficacy in dealing with linguistic diversity (TSELD, Doll and Stangen 2021) as an affective-motivational competence facet, a survey on LRT-related opportunities to learn (OTL), and basic personal background characteristics. A structural equation model analysis (SEM-analysis) shows that the pre-service teachers did improve their LRT competence in the interdisciplinary course and that their self-efficacy increased in all three dimensions (Instruction, Diagnostics, and General TSELD). The expanded use of LRT-related OTL had a (small) positive effect on the development of LRT competence and on two of the three dimensions of self-efficacy. Furthermore, a follow-up measurement on self-efficacy four months after the post-test shows stability of the observed increase in competence for the affective-motivational facet.