TESOL Student-teacher attitudes to smartphones as classroom resources

This presentation will document research conducted with a series of cohorts of TESOL student-teachers at Master's Degree level at a Scottish university. The aim of the research project was to explore the teachers' perceptions of smartphones as a potential classroom tool, and to investigate the factors which either encourage or discourage teachers from employing the devices as part of their teaching activities.

Across modules, students and the researcher used their phones to explore language learning resources, shared experiences, and documented their out-of-class use of a range of apps. The trainee teachers were interviewed by the researcher, and the interviews were subjected to thematic analysis to capture and explore themes that were consistently identified across the data. findings indicate that the trainee teachers are tentatively in favour of using smartphones in the classroom, and feel that, as teachers, it is something they 'should' be familiar with and capable of. Nevertheless, a number of factors impact on their likelihood of actually using the devices. including concerns over just how prepared they are to use the devices, worries that introducing smartphones in the classroom might lead to more disruptive classes, and pondering what the teacher's role is in the personalised use of smartphones.

The presentation will end with a discussion of how each of these factors can be mitigated against to support the effective use of smartphones as part of a teacher's classroom repertoire.