Teachers’ acceptance of M-Learning in english language teaching: a mixed methods analysis of the underpinning factors

Abstract

Historically, performance inequality perpetrates in Catalunya (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2006, 2007), where students from lower socioeconomical possibilities are seen to perform poorer in school, specially at English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The current pandemic and the lockdown suffered in Spain during the school year of 2019/20 are doing nothing but to worsen this performance gap (Tarabini & Jacovkis, 2020). Digital educational tools and resources were broadly implemented during the lockdown so that theachers could adapt their teaching practices. In this context, were technology penetrated the educational process in all education stages, school teachers expressed suffering an overwhelming workload, partially because of all the digital tools they had to learn impementing (Tarabini & Jacovkis, 2020). Given this situation, this project studies what factors underpin the acceptance and adoption of Mobile-Assited Language Learning (MALL) in English Language Teaching (ELT). The analysis is performed in two phases: a quantitative phase by means of the work performed by Venkatesh et al. (2003, 2012) on the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) – which has been specifically adapted to the analysis of the acceptance of MALL; and a qualitative phase that explores three case studies that help deepen our understadning of why some of these factors have a bigger impact than others on the levels of acceptance. Our findings suggest the original UTAUT2 factors that were seen as more important, i.e. hedonic motivation and performance expectancy (Venkatesh et al., 2012) might not be as important as other factors i.e. habit and effort expectancy. Moreover, the results show that the level of acceptance are conditioned by age and experience with MALL, which could be due to a digital gap between both A) younger and older teachers, and B) more experienced and less experienced teachers (Hinojo-Lucena et al., 2019; Hu et al., 2020). This project also tries to link the UTAUT2 model with the Technology Pedagogy and Content Knowledge (TPACK) model (Koehler et al., 2013), which seems to have an impact on the adoption of MALL (Scherer et al., 2019) that should be explored further. This project lays out a research basis from which further work can build on and reach a better understanding of how these factors and knowledge areas condition the integration of educational technologies in ELT, so that educational institutions and technology providers can work towards compensating those factors that act against a pedagogically sound integration of MALL in the school system.