Evaluating novice and experienced EFL teachers' perceived TPACK for their professional development

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) is a framework which provides a number of opportunities for conducting research in teacher edu- cation, teacher professional development, and teacher’s use of technology. By applying TPACK framework, this mixed methods study aimed to examine novice and experienced EFL teachers’ differences in their perceived TPACK and its influences on their professional development. To this end, for the quantitative phase, a sample of 427 EFL teachers, both male and female with different teaching experiences were selected from various English language institutes in Tehran. In the qualitative phase, 16 EFL teachers were selected for a structured interview. The quantitative results indicated that experienced teachers were of significantly higher scores in terms of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge subscales. In contrast, novice teachers were of significantly higher scores considering their technological knowledge, technological content knowledge, technological pedago- gical knowledge, and TPACK. The qualitative results demonstrated that novice and experienced EFL teachers favored different professional development programs tailored to their needs. Likewise, they claimed that they could bridge the gap in their knowledge through collaboration in professional development courses

Peer-Assessment and Student-Driven Negotiation of Meaning: Two Ingredients for Creating Social Presence in Online EFL Social Contexts

With the current availability of state-of-the-art technology, particularly the Internet, people have expanded their channels of communication. This has similarly led to many people utilizing technology to learn second/foreign languages. Nevertheless, many current computer-assisted language learning (CALL) programs still appear to be lacking in interactivity and what is termed social presence, which is in turn an obstacle to the learners assuming active roles in their online experience of L2 learning. Consequently, the existing CALL programs do not seem to have updated themselves from the obsolete behavioristic and communicative genres to reach for the integrative one to yield optimum interactivity. The present study has attempted to cast light on the prospect of creating an online learning community that could optimize the patterns of interaction among the students and the teacher with the intention of creating online social presence. Using a qualitative research based on grounded theory, the researchers attempted to collect and analyze the data vis-à-vis the participants’ feedback on the research questions that were cyclically obtained from 42 English students of the first researcher’s weblog through 41 semi-structured interviews at the end of each virtual class on Skype and Discord over one year. The results suggested that content-based instruction (CBI) in which the students can opt for and create the content of the course through engaging in asynchronous activities and performing peer-assessment in the comment forms and discussion boards before practicing negotiation of meaning in each synchronous class could maximize the level of student-student interactivity and social presence among the L2 learners

Teachers’ technology-related self-images and roles: Exploring CALL teachers’ professional identity

Despite the surge of interest in language teachers’ professional identity (TPI) as an integral component of their professional growth (Barkhuizen, 2017; Clarke, 2018) and the increasing interest in the field of computer assisted language learning (CALL) (Nami et al., 2015), there is still a paucity of research on the professional identity of language teachers who integrate technology with language instruction (CALL teachers). To bridge this gap, the present study explored the components that construct CALL teachers’ professional identity (CALLTPI). The data were collected from a set of in-depth, semi-structured interviews investigating perceptions of 24 CALL informants (educators, experts, professors, and teachers) from different contexts and countries about CALL teachers’ roles in technology integration in English language teaching (ELT). Fifteen sub-components were inferred from the thematic analysis of the interview transcripts as compared against the available literature on CALL teacher education and language teachers’ professional identity. These sub-components corresponded to three major components, namely, CALL teachers’ individual identity, classroom-based identity, and agentive identity. The results can provide CALL teacher educators with implications for designing professional development programs with the aim of developing teachers’ professional identity and enhancing the effectiveness of technology integration in ELT