SELF-EFFICACY OF TEACHER CANDIDATES IN DESIGNING CALL ACTIVITIES FOR ENGLISH LEARNERS WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF TECHNOLOGICAL PEDAGOGICAL AND CONTENT KNOWLEDGE (TPACK)

ABSTRACT

Research shows that the number of English Learners (ELs) has been increasing significantly in K-12 classrooms around the world. This has led to an increase in the need for qualified second language teachers, which spurred a five-fold increase in the number of online teacher education programs in the United States since the 1990s and increasing numbers of online courses for teacher candidates (TCs). Therefore, teacher education programs need to offer effective technology-based courses to provide TCs with the best practices in language teaching.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) course in improving TC self-efficacy for integrating CALL activities for Non-Native English Speakers (NNES) in the classroom. In this study, 16 TCs in the U.S. designed a variety of CALL activities for 15 Chinese and 16 Turkish students. On the basis of a self-report survey and open-ended questions in the same survey as well as the student perception of instruction (SPI) survey, this non-experimental correlational design study revealed the relationships between different variables: the perception of TCs’ pedagogical and content knowledge, CALL technology knowledge, confidence level in motivating students, and assessment and feedback awareness in teaching English in a distance learning environment.

Despite the small sample size, the regression procedure predicted 92% of the variation in the dependent criterion, and the qualitative data also supported this large effect size.

The results indicated that designing CALL activities as a hands-on experience increased TCs’ self-efficacy in technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK). The paper discusses the pedagogical implications for training TCs to teach EFL learners through CALL in the digital age.