Imre Fekete: Technology in English teaching • The Hungarian university context
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4. Results and Discussion
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4.3. Study 3: The Learners’ Interview Study
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4.3.5. ICT for (Private, Planned, or Ongoing) Teaching Purposes (Study3RQ5)

4.3.5. ICT for (Private, Planned, or Ongoing) Teaching Purposes (Study3RQ5)

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4.3.5.1 Guiding Principles of Inclusion – How to Involve Technology? The participants who already had some teaching experience were asked to explain their philosophy of technology inclusion. To illustrate their views, Tímea said, “I think it is worth using ICT devices as teachers, but only to a certain extent. I mean, I think ICT is a basic part of education, for example, I don’t consider using a PPT file ICT use, but when it comes to games or mind maps, I’d use it cautiously, bearing the learners’ needs in mind”, and as Sándor also summarized it, “I always think of the purpose, whatever my purpose is with something, I choose a[n instructional] delivery method that fits my purpose, the purpose comes first”. Léna and András expressed similar views to Sándor and claimed that too much digital stimulus is counterproductive. Andrea said, “it takes an awful lot of time for teachers to put digital materials together […], I use ICT if it does not suppress learning and does not lower its quality”. Iván added that he usually opted for using ICT devices every class, and his main governing principle is to use technology when it saves time.

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Andrea, Léna, András and Sándor also mentioned that an instructor needs to teach learners about the educational purposes of technology explicitly, and that techno-inclusive lessons require much effort in terms of pre-testing the material and meeting the ethical considerations of technology use. For example, Léna, András and Sándor always make sure to register for useful websites using their accounts when it comes to teaching young schoolchildren and they either share their login data or use screensharing and remote control to let their private students operate websites from a distance. Sándor especially likes introducing his learners to the functions of monolingual dictionaries, and in his experience, “I think nine out of 10 students only need a boost, to see that it is good, to see that it is easy because at the beginning, these are just websites entirely in English half of which cannot make sense [to the learners]”. Sándor sometimes asks his students to share their screens with him and provides feedback and recommendations on the organisation of their English study folder.

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Apart from ethical and security concerns, preparation is key according to the participants. In private teaching, Ágota and Sándor mentioned the importance of needs analysis, and Sándor even prepared a syllabus together with his students. András also prepares and tests digital tools frequently, he claims, “in traditional teaching, I think improvisation is more common, while planning an online or ICT-based lesson needs more precision, you have to double-check everything, try every scenario out because [if something will not work] it is more difficult to improvise”.
 

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4.3.5.2 Technology in the Learners’ Teaching Repertoire – What is Involved? The participants used a wide range of technologies in their teaching practices. Each participant with teaching experience mentioned using Quizlet. Tímea and Sándor also encouraged their students to use monolingual dictionaries. Apart from looking up words, Sándor teaches his learners about the pronunciation function of Cambridge Dictionary as well as encourages them to use it for word formation; when learners key in words, the dictionary automatically predicts the word forms by supplementing the stem word with suffixes.

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Tímea, Andrea, Flóra and Sándor use Google Documents (GoogleDocs – https://docs.google.com/) with their learners because it is a suitable tool for private tutoring. GoogleDocs make it possible for the tutor and the learner to access and edit the same document. Tímea said, “I sometimes ask my students to write a short essay in our class and I observe their thinking processes and check what mistakes they make”. Sándor also uses this function and enjoys that all kinds of materials can be pasted in the document for practice purposes, and he also likes its learner-friendly functions such as good text editing, spellcheck and word count. Tímea sometimes uses OneNote (https://www.microsoft.com/hu-hu/microsoft-365/onenote/digital-note-taking-app) for the same purposes – to have simultaneous access to one document with learners. Léna, during her on-site teaching practice, used Canvas (https://www.instructure.com/canvas) as an LMS system, while András used Google Classroom (https://classroom.google.com/).

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Tímea also frequently uses unabridged, authentic materials such as Times articles with her students and promotes the use of TED Ed videos (https://ed.ted.com/), short, informative talks with accompanying materials such as multiple choice and debate questions. With less proficient learners, Tímea enjoys using Wikipedia’s Simple English pages and British Council’s Learn English sites (https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/) because the latter offers ready-to-use teaching materials with labels (e.g., Materials for kids, for teenagers), and the former gives a simple overview about any topic they deal with during the lessons. Another collection of worksheets liked by Tímea is All Things Topics (https://www.allthingstopics.com/), which she mainly uses for revision purposes.

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Sándor, who previously taught disadvantaged children in a small primary school, found it extremely important to educate them about the basics of technology because the lack of certain familiarity with technology contributes to widening the digital divide. He encouraged learners to use the advantages of online dictionaries, collaborative websites (such as GoogleDocs), and Grammarly (https://www.grammarly.com/), a writing assistant programme that offers spellcheck services and provides synonyms for users whenever they type something in their computers (no matter if it is a Word document or an online form). Sándor also encouraged his learners to use Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/), which he finds very useful when it comes to translating technical words, but he always promotes double checking the translation using Google’s image search; if the images are of the object, etc. sought for in English, the translation is most likely correct.

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Léna enjoys creating crosswords online for her students with the help of several free online crossword creating tools (e.g., https://worksheets.theteacherscorner.net/make-your-own/crossword/). Diána explicitly teaches her students about PowerPoint and such free template sites as Slidesgo (https://slidesgo.com/), a website with hundreds of freely downloadable PPT templates. András uses Mentimeter to engage students in the lessons with its on-screen feedback possibilities and likes using British Council’s Tube Quizard (http://tubequizard.com/), where learners have to listen to a video and type what they hear systematically, e.g., expressions with like, or the use of past participle verb forms. Sándor uses a very similar website called TypeRacer (https://play.typeracer.com/) for similar purposes. When it comes to quizzes, all participants with teaching experience mentioned creating Kahoot! quizzes, or using websites such as Mentimeter, Google Forms (https://www.google.com/forms/), Hot Potatoes (https://hotpot.uvic.ca/) or Redmenta (https://redmenta.com/) for quick online survey purposes. Ágota’s philosophy is to ask students to take part in creating these revision quizzes on Quizlet or Kahoot!, but the process has to be supervised closely by the instructor.
 

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4.3.5.3 Discussion. The technology use of the participants in their teaching practices revealed that future teachers preferred the technological alternatives to the non-technological ones whenever their use was prompted by a pedagogical reason. For some participants, online (private) teaching resulted in the use of digital vocabulary learning, testing or activity creating websites, activating their technological content knowledge (how to create these activities) in accordance with their technological pedagogical knowledge (how to use these activities for instructional purposes). Most participants also voiced the importance of using technology only if it is prompted by a pedagogical purpose; thus, first the pedagogical reason, then the instructional method should be selected (Kárpáti & Hunya, 2009; Kárpáti et al., 2015).

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Whenever there is no connection between the pedagogical reasoning and the instructional delivery method of technology inclusion, the instructor runs the risk of using technology arbitrarily (Czirfusz et al., 2020). One of the major problems with this is that for the learners, ad hoc technology use can be entertaining and motivating, and teachers may mistake learners’ enthusiasm with meaningful use (Graham et al., 2012). University students’ device use is determined by the device use of their instructors, but as seen earlier, students use a wider range of technological possibilities than their instructors perceive to use. This means that instructors should put special emphasis on developing their students’ critical skills and TPACK knowledge subdomains to ensure that their technology use would always be pedagogically motivated.

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Evidently, there is more to technology use than sharing websites and playing online games with the learners to entertain them. Several participants mentioned the importance of organising digital learning materials and making sure that the students use technology with knowledge gains that are tangible, e.g., they create notes or store learning materials in a place they can easily reach for learning or revision. Apart from the critical skills needed to determine whether a technological alternative should be involved in the learning process, (future) instructors should also aid their learners in how to organise knowledge and materials digitally. This could be done explicitly (as voiced by the participants, in the early stages of education) or implicitly, by e.g., instructors reflecting on their own practices, reasons and ways of including technology, even as part of (not only teaching methodology) classes. Continuous pedagogical reflectivity on teachers’ and learners’ technology use strengthens positive beliefs and contributes to creating a stress-free environment of use (Forgó & Antal, 2013).
 
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