TOWARDS THE ESTABLISHMENT OF TEACHERS’ MULTICONTEXT INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT) TRAINING

Abstract

The 21^st Century sets new challenges and new demands for teachers and educators in their professional practice. The rapid growth of information communication technology brings about changes in nature and the ways of human communication. Today, people communicate through technology-based devices, using multimodal texts in many, if not all, aspects of their daily life through various ICT-based activities. Consequently, the teaching of English needs to be adjusted to respond to those new challenges. In other words, ICT literacy in today’s daily life is a must, and ICT-based language teaching, including in EFL teaching is therefore imperative. However, previous studies show that instead of a huge number of users, the use of ICT-based devices for learning is not necessarily promising. This study explores teachers’ use of ICT-based devices in their daily and classroom teaching in the hope that the findings will provide a strong basis for the utilization of ICT-based devices in classroom practice, and based on the result of this study, proposes multi-context training programs for teachers. For that purpose, a survey was conducted to collect data on the possession and use of such ICT-based devices as smartphones, tabs, laptop, and desktop computers in their daily and their classroom life to 24 junior and senior high school teachers in different areas in West Java, Indonesia. Comparative data has also been collected from 24 teachers in Nara Prefecture, Japan. The findings show that all the respondents possessed at least one smartphone, the majority possessed laptops, some possessed desktop computers, and none possessed tabs; however, the utilization of those devices in language classes is still far from being appropriate. This may be due to the nature of their status as ‘immigrants’ to the digital era. Based on the findings, multi-context training programs have been proposed and elaborated.