Curricular factors

The results and discussion in 4.3.3 suggest that a large number of teachers

believed in the effectiveness of IT integration into English instruction on promoting the diversity of curriculum and agreed that it could be well fit into the scheduled

curriculum. The tendency could also be observed from the findings of the interview sessions in the present study, which indicated most teachers’ preference in using IT resources to diversify as well as to facilitate their teaching. Better yet, it could be interpreted as a comforting outcome yielded from the fact that teachers’ professional teaching ability had made it a basic and indispensible requirement. They needed to be able to adopt the most appropriate media to present the materials and find an ideal way to fit it into the curriculum after taking the curriculum and all the available options into careful consideration. Therefore, there seems to be no need for lengthy discussion about the curricular factors in future attempts to investigate into the factors contributing to IT integration into English instruction.

Discouraging Factors

Next, with regard to curricular factors that might prevent elementary teachers using IT in English class, no teachers held the opinion that they would decide not to use IT in their English instruction because of its negative influence on the curriculum design or development. However, T12 would sometimes choose to skip IT integrated activities because of time limit or poor quality of some of the songs in the e-book.

Instead of viewing IT integration into instruction as an option that might have an effect on their curricular design in an undesirable way, many of the interviewed teachers emphasized their positive attitude toward it and stressed their careful consideration about when to use IT and which IT technology to use in order to best facilitate students in learning.

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4.2.4 Discussion Frequency

In the interview, some of them even expressed their strong preference for integrating IT into their instruction as well as their heavy reliance on IT facilities to present the teaching materials. One teacher went as far as saying that she would have great trouble conducting her English class if IT facilities were to be unavailable to her since the design of her teaching schedule mainly involved the use of computer and interactive whiteboard.

Patterns of IT use

According to the statements made by the interviewed teachers, ten out of fifteen of them reported to have a special English classroom for them to use, with all of the others having computers and projector in use in an ordinary classroom, homeroom classroom in most cases. Among the five teachers in the list, three of them had their classes in a special English classroom while two of them needed to go to the students’ homeroom classroom. From the conclusion drawn from results generated from all the instruments mentioned above , a considerably large number of the teacher participants were willing to make use of IT resources in their English classes as long as they had ready access to IT facilities.

As for the media they tended to integrate in their English instruction includes e-book, multimedia CD provided by textbook publishers, self-made power point slides, ready-made or adapted version of interactive games via IWB, a variety of on-line resources, and even self-made video-taped films. Through e-book, teachers had little difficulty in presenting learning materials such as vocabulary, story plots, sentence patterns, and even phonics chants and songs to the students. Best of all, most of the content in the e-book are accompanied by multimedia effects like sounds, music, pictures, and animation. As for what the e-book might not have included, many of the

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interviewed teachers reported to have made a habit of making power point slides of their own in order to present extra information or offer more chances for students to practice using the vocabulary or newly learned sentence patterns. In the slides, they could often add elements that cater to the students’ common interest or relate to their life experiences. Apart from the presentation of materials, hands-on practices were also crucial in English teaching and learning process. Therefore, interactive games via IWB served as one of the best incentives for elementary school students. Some teachers would make use of the ready-made software like lot-drawing program or smart board function. They wanted to add some fun into their practicing exercises while teachers with higher computer literacy could even go a step further to adapt certain programs into interactive game-like exercises for students to learn through playing games. With the program, they just had to substitute the content for students to practice different parts of the materials. In addition to the materials included in the curriculum,

information on the internet was also a great source of teaching and learning materials.

In schools located in metropolitan areas, where students generally had higher English learning achievement, in order to satisfy their stronger learning needs, teachers usually needed to spare more efforts searching for a greater variety of on-line resources to offer the students extra information. However, in schools located in remote areas, where students might lack learning motivation or were reluctant to learn English, teachers also felt the need to find proper materials, such as interesting short films, songs, or

information about festivals, to both educate and entertain them. Several of the interviewed teachers expressed their preference for video-taping the students’

performance in class, which were often used for students to share and exchange group performance among peers. In a word, for participants of the interview, e-book and power point slides were adopted mostly for the presentation of materials. Interactive

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IWB games provided students with fun learning activities whereas on-line information offered additional educational resources for teachers.

Hopeful as the above mentioned descriptions about teachers’ frequency and various patterns of use of IT resources might seem, their actual level of use might not be as promising. Examining the ways in which the participants made use of IT

resources, most of them were indeed making great attempts in including the elements of IT in English instruction with an increasing frequency and proportion, which, measured by the evolving versions of Level of IT Use in Instruction, only fell on level 1 to level 3.

The main reason is that most of them were only observed to engage the students in participation in IT related activities. However, relatively few of them had gone so far as to help enhance students’ ability of using IT resources to find answers, solve problems, and eventually construct their own language knowledge system. Although many of the surveyed teachers seemed to have moved a step forward from teacher-centered methods toward student-centered strategies, they still had a long way to go if the goal of higher level of IT use in elementary English instruction were to be achieved

Perceived effectiveness of IT integration on teachers’ teaching

Despite the fact that many teachers also found it time-consuming to do preparation in integrating IT into their instruction, they still perceived its effectiveness since they found electronic files to be able to be stored properly and used repeatedly. Likewise, most the interviewees of the present study also made invariable comments on their positive attitude toward the effectiveness of using IT resources in their English classes.

The comments were based on the fact that they found it could help create a more smooth flow of class activities, achieve greater teaching diversity, and lead to better interaction between teachers and students. With rich contents included in the e-book as well as multiple functions attached to it, teachers could count on it while presenting vocabulary, stories, feature article, sentence patterns, and even songs and chants to the

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students without having to switch between IT mode and blackboard mode. Meanwhile, through the great variety of materials and information IT resources could offer, teachers were able to diversify their teaching and add richness and colorfulness to their class activities. Finally, with the interactive nature of the programs for computer and IWB games and exercises, students were given more chances of learning by doing (or

playing games) and thus having more positive interaction with their peers as well as the teacher. Moreover, teachers’ flexible use of IT resources had had a satisfying effect on teachers’ teaching, which could be proven by the hard evidence that most students got rather enthusiastic and excited when IT integrated activities were being conducted, with their full concentration on the instruction and active participation in the activities.

Perceived effectiveness of IT integration on students’ learning

Similarly, a majority of the interviewed teachers expressed their positive

comments on IT integration into English instruction. The only difference was that most of them praised it mainly for its effectiveness on helping teachers meet students’

diversified learning needs. To be more specific, both the multimedia effects and interactive functions of IT resources managed to satisfy students of different learning styles and catered to students having multiple intelligences. Moreover, the flexible and adjustable nature of IT resources also contributed a lot for teachers to take care of students’ special personal needs by placing emphasis on specific stimulation channels or focusing on different parts of language skills.

Perceived effectiveness of IT integration on curriculum design

In addition to the more conventional teacher-lecturing, use of posters and flash cards, collaborative learning, IT resources also served as another useful alternative, with which teachers were able to achieve the teaching objectives of certain units, whether it was to introduce new vocabulary or to acquaint the students with sentence patterns. When the teachers were convinced that IT resources could be the best medium

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to get the message across, such as the time when they wanted to introduce theme stories, teach phonics, or demonstrating chants and songs, they would not hesitate to make use of it. Moreover, most of them found IT resources could come in handy when they expected to make a change in their class activities or offer extra cultural information to the students. All in all, for the majority of the participants in the survey study, IT integration into English instruction was definitely an ideal option not only to help diversify their teaching but also to fit well into their curriculum design.

Major factors: environmental

None of the teachers interviewed mentioned any concerns about not having proper computer facility in use.

However, some of them did expressed their concern about the poor quality of on-line service as well as the expectations they had of the school administration to speed up in replacement and renewal of their existing facilities. The quantitative data in 4.1.4 could also reveal the fact that there were still about half of the elementary school needed to be provided with on-line services in their classrooms. Speaking of classrooms, there was one interesting result that deserves special attention. That is, teachers’ shared expectation to have access to a special English classroom exclusively for them to conduct English classes. According to several teachers who had to conduct English classes in the students’ respective homeroom classroom, they would often hesitate in making the decision to integrate IT into their lesson plans since they might not be given full access to the computer in the classroom, not to mention their uncertainty about the condition of the facilities in each of the classrooms. Consequently, it seemed a more feasible solution to spare efforts in assuring each English teacher a classroom where they could make free use of IT facilities whenever they want to.

Major factors: personal

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Coincidently, the statements made by the interviewees also confirmed their strong beliefs in the positive influences of IT use on English teaching and learning. Therefore, it seemed sensible to infer that, in most cases, teachers’ personal belief in the

effectiveness of IT use served as an encouraging factors in persuading them to integrate IT in their English classes. As for some of the teachers who might refrain from using IT resources, discouraging factors mainly focused on their lack of computer knowledge or ability, and poor computer literacy. Other reasons might only be presented in certain rare cases, in which the teacher prefer demonstrating by herself to using IT facility, or where the teacher found the use of IT to be ineffective or even distracting.

Major factors: social

In the previous study (ChanLinet al., 2006) intended for investigation into

teachers’ reaction towards integrating technology into creative teaching, the researchers identified the following factors, including supportive companions, positive

reinforcement from students’ achievement, parents’ encouragement, and resource support from community, as influential variables. The results of the qualitative data of the present study also lead the researcher to similar conclusions, except for fewer cases in mentioning encouragement and support from parents, which is probably due to the cultural differences in the educational structure. In Taiwan, or Chinese community in a larger sense, traditionally, it is uncommon for parents to take active roles in influencing teachers’ education decision-making, which might be taken as a hint of parents’ distrust toward the teachers. Other than that, most of the encouraging social factors were also nominated by the participants when they talked about how such social factors as support from school administration and colleagues with computer skills or higher level of computer literacy, positive feedback from students, and even the public’s expectation of teachers concerning IT integration into core subjects.

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Nevertheless, there were also interviewees making complaints about

in-service training programs targeted on IT integration into instruction and its failure to meet the needs of elementary English teachers. Due to the diversified natures existing in different core subjects, it would be rather difficult for them to apply what they had been informed of to actual English classes if the experiences came from teachers of another subject like math, science, or even geography.

Major factors: curricular

In line with the results of quantitative data, the interview and observed teachers invariably referred to use of IT resources as being able to diversify the teachers’

teaching as well as to well fit into the curriculum design. Most of them were convinced that integrating IT resources into their English instruction would successfully help promote the diversity of teaching methods and activities on condition that they chose proper media for the right unit at a right time. With their familiarity with the distinctive features of different multimedia effect, teachers could always manage to achieve their planned teaching objectives by adopting appropriate IT resources.

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CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION

In this section, major findings of the present study will be summarized and organized so as to answer the four research questions first. Then improvements for government authorities and educators will be presented next. Finally, limitations and suggestions for future study will be provided.