To organise, revise or visualise learning materials, Olga sometimes used Mindmaster (https://www.mindmeister.com/), an online mind mapping software that helped her and fitted her learning style. For systematic and gamified motivational practice, Ágota, Zsóka and Olga sometimes used Duolingo (https://www.duolingo.com), a language teaching website, but according to them, it was best for third or additional language learning practice. Ágota also tried and had good memories of Xeropan (https://xeropan.com/) a language teaching gamified website similar to Duolingo. For learning material revision, participants frequently searched for YouTube videos explaining the material, which they find more motivating and effective than revising notes (Zsóka, Iván, Tímea, Léna). When it came to taking notes, though, Léna preferred her own notes to using others’, as she said, “I think it is better if I put something together myself, on the one hand, while I’m doing it, I’m learning the material, on the other hand, it is more personalised, the words are defined how I’d like them to be defined and the whole thing is just not alien to me”. Additionally, Tímea, Sándor and Iván mentioned the importance of organising their notes properly because if their study folders are disorganised, it becomes impossible to keep track of the materials. As Tímea put it, “[e]very folder and file have to have a proper name, and not Screenshot1 and Screenshot2, because these are terrible”.

For academic purposes, Diána and Zsóka mentioned using trusted resource websites such as JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/) and Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/), and Diána also frequently used Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/). Diána said, “I always make sure it [what resource I find online] was written by a researcher or scholar, someone who has a track record in the field, and for that you need to turn to official reference sites”. Others reported using online dictionaries. Andrea prefers Merriam-Webster’s dictionary (https://www.merriam-webster.com/), while Iván, Ágota mentioned Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/) and Cambridge Dictionary (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/). Andrea mentioned that before enrolling in university education, she sometimes liked using ‘5-minute English’ (5 perc angol – https://www.5percangol.hu/), a Hungarian English teaching website popular with people for their short practice tasks. Some of the participants, Sándor, Iván and Ágota were already planning their theses when the interviews were recorded; while Iván did not know his topic yet, Ágota already had a supervisor and was already looking for sources on gamification in EFL teaching, while Sándor was writing about GoogleDocs as a pre-writing skills development tool in private teaching.

For extramural purposes, all participants reported watching Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/) and listening to music on Spotify (https://www.spotify.com/), but none of them explicitly treated these instances as learning possibilities; that is, none of them note down words or phrases or collects vocabulary while enjoying a TV show or listening to a song. András and Klára mentioned that earlier it was their hobby to look up and translate the English lyrics of their favourite songs into Hungarian, which they had fond memories of. Zsóka and Tímea also liked listening to Spotify podcasts, and Tímea preferred reading using her Kindle e-book reader. Tímea also liked watching some TED talks she found intriguing when she had the time.

Finally, two intriguing remarks have to be mentioned about peer rejection towards using technology for learning (and prospective teaching) purposes voiced by Olga and Iván. Olga said, “I think ICT use should be the entire focus of a [methodology] class, but it might not work, and I think it might not work because many of my groupmates really think they don’t want it. They for real want to teach from books and play the listening tasks from a CD player”. Iván, whose second major is Teacher of IT, said that “in my experience, students and future teachers are afraid of these [digital] possibilities, […] when someone brings something new to the class, they say it is so good, but they wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t dare to do it, they are afraid of what might happen if anything goes wrong and they wouldn’t be able to solve the problem on the spot, so they stick to what they know and don’t even dare to experiment”.

 

Participants generally liked using technological alternatives, even though there is not a consensus that digital alternatives such as using Quizlet for vocabulary learning is more effective than turning to traditional vocabulary learning methods. For example, using Kahoot! for EFL knowledge development resulted in statistically significant gains compared to the results of the control group in the study of Yürük (2020), but no significant difference was found by Kapsalis and colleagues (2020). This seems to confirm that technology in itself is inseparable from its teaching and learning context, and it is hard to research in isolation (Lim, 2002; McDougall & Jones, 2006; Sutherland et al., 2004); however, if learners tend to prefer technological alternatives, it would be ideal to conduct needs analyses concerning preferences and make use of the digital alternatives or discuss and reflect on these digital possibilities wherever learners’ attitudes and motivation point towards favouring the digital solutions. The ones rejecting technology inclusion by principle could be those who had been taught entirely using traditional teaching delivery methods, and therefore they had limited or no chances of gaining positive experiences with it.