Developing 21st Century Skills in a Foreign Language Classroom: EFL Student Teachers’ Beliefs and Self-Awareness

This study reports on EFL student teachers’ opinions, beliefs and their self-awareness of developing 21st century skills, particularly the 4Cs: critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, in the Polish educational context. A questionnaire designed for the purpose of this study was administered to 53 participants who were all student teachers of English enrolled in bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes. The survey results indicate that although the majority of the participants showed a low level of understanding of what 21st century skills are, they were fairly positive about integrating them into foreign language classroom instruction. At the same time, the teacher trainees tended to overrate their own abilities to develop the 4Cs in their future students. These findings suggest a greater need to raise FL teachers’ awareness as to the implementation of particular 21st century skills in the classroom. It is also postulated that enhancing such skills among student teachers in the course of teacher training is a prerequisite for 21st century skills-oriented pedagogy.