AUTHOR=Lu Jinjin , Han Feifei , Janík Tomáš 

TITLE=Exploring social media technologies for novice EFL school teachers to collaborate and communicate: A case in the Czech Republic

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1010686

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1010686

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=With increasing numbers of international schools, traditional EFL teaching methods cannot satisfy students’ needs. This study aims to investigate perceptions of social media technologies (e.g., Web 2.0) and willingness to adopt such technologies to collaborate and communicate in multicultural classrooms among novice school EFL teachers in the Czech Republic. The participants were 100 novice school EFL teachers in Prague and the South Moravian regions in the Czech Republic. The study used a mixed research method consisting of a survey (stage 1) and a semi-structured interview (stage 2). The survey examined the participants’ appraisal and concerns of using social media technologies to collaborate and to communicate; and the level of willingness to use social media technologies. A hierarchical cluster analysis using participants’ responses with regard to their attitudes and behavioural tendency towards using Web 2.0 social media technologies in language classrooms identified three clusters of teachers. The teachers who were most likely to adopt social Web 2.0 technologies were those had the highest ratings on both appraisals and concerns of using social media in language classrooms. The results from the semi-structured interviews were consistent with those from the survey. Jointly, the results from the two stages demonstrated that most pre-service teachers favored using Web 2.0 technology for collaboration and communication between colleagues and stakeholders in a broader community, but they displayed contrasting levels of appraisal and concerns towards using social media technologies. Participants believed that these might be due to their different levels of ICT proficiency, workload, and working environment.