EFL TEACHERS’ KNOWLEDGE OF THE USE AND DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING (CALL) MATERIALS

Even though there are a plethora of CALL materials available to EFL teachers nowadays, very limited attention has been directed toward the issue that most EFL teachers are merely the consumers of CALL materials. The main challenge is to equip EFL teachers with the required CALL materials development skills to enable them to be contributors to CALL materials development (Motteram, 2011). Accordingly, this research was carried out to unravel the current challenges and difficulties in enabling EFL teachers to acquire CALL materials development and implementation skills. Three groups of EFL stakeholders, i.e. EFL teachers (n=208) who taught English at universities, schools, and language teaching institutions, teacher educators (n=15) who were university instructors and educated MA and PhD students of TEFL, and teacher trainers (n=32) who mainly prepared EFL teachers for teaching at private language teaching institutions, were identified and participated in this study. The findings of in-depth interviews and questionnaires confirmed that the three groups of participants had positive attitudes toward the use of CALL materials and development of CALL materials by EFL teachers while teacher educators had slightly more positive attitudes. It was further illustrated that the EFL teachers did not have the required basic skills to develop or use CALL materials. In addition, there are some impediments to the development of CALL materials by EFL teachers. Moreover, the findings of observations and interviews indicated that CALL materials development is not a part of teacher education/training programs in Iran and the EFL teachers do not use CALL materials in their EFL courses. Finally, the participants proposed some strategies based on which EFL teachers would be able to obtain the necessary skills to develop and use CALL materials.