Ecuadorian high school teachers’ perceptions on ICT use in their EFL classes

Abstract

The current research, Ecuadorian high school teachers’ perceptions on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) use in their EFL classes, has as purpose to investigate and analyze the EFL teachers’ perceptions on ICT use. It was conducted in Loja, twenty EFL teachers, ten women and ten men, from two private and two public high schools were involved in this research work. All those teachers were asked to take part in a survey, and six of them were selected randomly to participate in an interview. The data was analyzed using the quantitative and qualitative methods. The results revealed that the barriers to use ICT in the EFL classes are: difficulty in understanding technical aspects of ICT, scare to use technological resources, lack of ICT training, and teachers age; meanwhile, the factors that promote teachers to use ICT are: ICT are necessary tools in educational settings, ICT helps to innovate and improve the teaching methodology, ICT helps to motivate the students to learn English, ICT has a positive impact on teaching process, and ICT use has more advantages than disadvantages in EFL teaching