A Study Of Faculty Members' And Instructors' Awareness, Routınes and Use Of Web 2.0 Tools In Foreıgn Language Teachıng

Abstract

The use of Web 2.0 tools in many walks of life has recently become ubiquitous owing to the fact that they offer a great many opportunities to the individuals to communicate, interact and collaborate with each. Though Web 2.0 concept seems like a new trend, it owes its’ popularity in the area of education to a deep-routed theoretical background of constructivism, social constructivism and other social learning theories. As the main purpose of learning a language is to communicate and interact with others effectively, the utilization of Web 2.0 tools in this area has become an inevitable part of the language teaching instruction since they give learners the opportunity to practise the language beyond the classroom walls in real life settings. Based on these ideas, language teachers should be aware of this technology and use them as much as possible in their profession, and the institutions should integrate this technology in their language teaching curricula. In the light of the ideas mentioned so far, this study aims to identify the faculty members’ and instructors’ awareness, routines and use of Web 2.0 tools in FLT process. In the current study, a mixed methods research design was adopted. While the quantitative data was gathered through an online questionnaire with the participation of 101 faculty members and instructors working at ELT departments and school of foreign languages of state universities in Turkey, interviews with 10 participants were carried out for the qualitative part of the research. The quantitative data was examined through statistical analyses via SPSS 21, and content analysis was employed in order to analyze the qualitative data. The results of the analyses have indicated that although the participants have a high awareness of the Web 2.0 tools in general, they do not use them a lot in their teaching practices. Furthermore, the participants’ level of the awareness and use differs in terms of various demographics. Also, though most of the participants are not knowledgeable about what Web 2.0 concept is, they have already used it for varying purposes without being aware of them. For the routine component of the study, the results revealed out that the only Web 2.0 tool they use on a regular basis is social network sites, and multimedia sharing tools follow them with the second frequency of use among the participants. What is more, having knowledge of the Web 2.0 concept was found to have a significant mean difference among the participants in terms of awareness, routine and use of the Web 2.0 tools.