Cogent Education (Jan 2020)
Raising teachers’ awareness of technology-enhanced language instruction through teacher education: Insights from Scaffolded dialogues
Abstract
Inspired from sociocultural theory, the present research is an interpretive and qualitative study of teachers’ beliefs development through participation in scaffolded dialogues in order to raise their awareness of technology-enhanced language instruction longitudinally. In doing so, 20 teachers, whose informed consent was obtained, were invited to take part in interview sessions three times and join in the sessions of scaffolded dialogues for six months. Classroom observations were also randomly done in order to investigate the relationship between teachers’ theoretical knowledge of technology with their practical understanding of using mobile apps and computer software in the classroom. In addition, the participant teachers’ classroom transcripts were subjected to qualitative investigation through conversation analysis to confirm the findings gathered from observations. Results revealed teachers’ gradual development of their beliefs regarding their “little-to-no awareness of technology” to “relative awareness of technology” and finally toward “raised awareness of technology”. Data gathered from classroom observations highlighted the strong alignment between teachers’ beliefs and actions in using technological devices to create more interaction resulting in the students’ increased self-confidence to take part in doing online tasks. Conversation analysis of teacher-learner interactions verified the findings of classroom observations by concluding that, to a very large extent, teachers’ raised awareness of technology-enhanced instruction was evidenced in the participant teachers’ practice teaching in which they could successfully and consciously apply technological devices in the classroom. As to the implication side, the present study calls for teacher education to familiarize teachers with the most recent theoretical and practical aspects of technology-enhanced instruction by encouraging them to benefit from scaffolded dialogues and share their practice teaching experience for the purpose of quality teaching and learning through technology-mediated classroom.
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