Abstract

This study investigates the correlation between EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ creative self-efficacy and students’ engagement in English classrooms. It also explores the EFL teachers’ main challenges in developing students’ engagement in learning English and their strategies for addressing them. This study involved seventy-three EFL teachers and 123 EFL students from three vocational schools in Central Java, Indonesia. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used in this study to gather information on teachers’ creative self-efficacy, students’ engagement relationship, and teachers’ challenges and strategies in enhancing students’ creative self-efficacy at vocational schools in teaching English. To analyze the quantitative data, the researchers used SPSS, utilizing descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation were used to analyze quantitative data. A thematic analysis with six steps was conducted to analyze the data: (1) familiarization with the data, (2) production of initial codes, (3) searching for themes, (4) reviewing themes, (5) defining and naming themes, and (6) writing the research report. The results indicated a significant positive correlation between teachers’ self-efficacy and students’ engagement. The study found that the teachers face three main challenges: students’ motivation and interest, curriculum and learning material, and students’ confidence. Moreover, teachers’ strategies to deal with the challenges are also discussed in the article.