5. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
5.5. W HAT AFFECTS TEACHERS ’ CHOICE OF MEDIA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING ?
10 15 18 17 40 100
Media services % 20 50 13 7 10 100
Wiki- and other web hosting services
% 13 30 25 10 22 100
Microblogs % 2 2 18 22 57 100
Blogs % 7 30 17 12 35 100
Social bookmarking web services
% 2 3 10 28 57 100
Podcasts % 3 12 12 27 47 100
The pedagogical skills in using most of the social media types could not be evaluated by many of the respondents as is shown in Table 17. It is most likely that the respondents have not used these media types in teaching and therefore cannot really say how good their skills in using them are. Despite this, there were also media types that the respondents felt they can use pedagogically quite well or very well. The pedagogical skills in using media services were evaluated as quite good or very good by 70 % of the respondents. The pedagogical skills in using wiki- and other web hosting services was evaluated as quite good or very good by 43 % of the respondents. The teachers were also quite confident in using blogs pedagogically, with 37 % evaluating their skills as quite good or very good. When it comes to the self-evaluation of pedagogical skills, the emphasis on other social media types was more on the ‘quite poorly’
or ‘very poorly’ options.
5.5. What affects teachers’ choice of media in language teaching?
This section will take a closer look at whether age, teaching experience or other factors affect teachers’ choice of media in language teaching. The data has been analysed with the SPSS Statistics program using a bivariate correlation. The Pearson Correlation will show whether there is a meaningful correlation between two variates. A high correlation is between -0.5 and
-1 or between 0.5 and 1. A medium correlation is between -0.5 and -0.3 or between 0.3 and 0.5. Meaningful correlations have been marked with stars in the tables.
According to the results, age and teaching experience do not significantly affect which types of media teachers use in language teaching. Table 18 shows the correlations between the age of the respondents and the frequency of using different media categories in teaching. The categories in the present study were print media, broadcast media, new media and social media.
Table 18. Correlation between age and frequency of using different media types in teaching.
Age Frequency of using print media Pearson Correlation -,061
Sig. (2-tailed) ,645
N 60
Frequency of using broadcast media Pearson Correlation ,212 Sig. (2-tailed) ,104
N 60
Frequency of using new media Pearson Correlation ,260 Sig. (2-tailed) ,045
N 60
Frequency of using social media Pearson Correlation ,109 Sig. (2-tailed) ,409
N 60
As Table 18 shows, the Pearson correlation is very small in all cases and thus it can be concluded that the age of the teacher does not affect the type of media that the teacher uses in his or her teaching. Table 19 presents the correlation between the teaching experience of the respondents and the frequency of use of different media types.
Table 19. Correlation between teaching experience and frequency of using different media types in teaching.
Teaching experience
in years Frequency of using print media Pearson Correlation -,093
Sig. (2-tailed) ,479
N 60
Frequency of using broadcast media Pearson Correlation ,167 Sig. (2-tailed) ,203
N 60
Frequency of using new media Pearson Correlation ,159 Sig. (2-tailed) ,224
N 60
Frequency of using social media Pearson Correlation ,023 Sig. (2-tailed) ,861
N 60
Similarly to the correlation between age and frequency of use, teaching experience does not have any significant correlation with the frequency of use, as can be seen from Table 19.
When the frequency of using different types of media in teaching is compared to the frequency of use on free time, there is no correlation between the two in the cases of print media and broadcast media. However, the frequency of use of new media and social media on free time seems to have some correlation with the frequency of use in teaching as is demonstrated in Table 20 and Table 21.
Table 20. Correlation between the frequency of using new media in teaching and on free time.
Frequency of using new
Table 21. Correlation between the frequency of using social media in teaching and on free time.
Frequency of using
According to the correlations in Table 20 and Table 21, the more teachers used types of new media and social media on their free time, the more they used them in teaching. This would imply that when it comes to new and social media, teachers’ free time use affects their utilisation of media in the language classroom. Especially in the case of social media, there is a high correlation between the two variates.
Table 22 and Table 23 show how the frequency of using new media and social media is affected by the respondents’ self-evaluation of their pedagogical skills.
Table 22. Correlation between the frequency of using new media in teaching and the self-evaluation of skills in the pedagogical use of new media.
Table 23. Correlation between the frequency of using social media in teaching and the self-evaluation of skills in the pedagogical use of social media. media and social media had the greatest correlation out of the four categories as is shown in Table 22 and 23. According to the correlations, the higher the respondent evaluated his or her skills in the pedagogical use of a certain media type, the more frequently he or she used that media in teaching. The correlation was the strongest with types of new media, with which there was a high correlation of -,545, and weakest with broadcast media, even though broadcast media also had a meaningful medium correlation at -,317 according to the Pearson Correlation.
Table 24 and Table 25 show the correlation between the frequency of using print or social media in teaching and the pedagogical usefulness of these media according to the respondents.
Table 24. Correlation between the frequency of using print media in teaching and the pedagogical usefulness of print media.
Table 25. Correlation between the frequency of using social media in teaching and the pedagogical usefulness of social media.
There was not a strong correlation between the frequency of using media in teaching and the pedagogical usefulness that respondents evaluated the types of media to have. Meaningful correlations were found between the frequency of use of print media and social media as presented in Table 24 and Table 25. The correlation in both cases is a medium correlation between the variates.
To conclude, there was no meaningful correlation between the age or teaching experience of the teachers and how often they used different types of media in language teaching. This can be seen as a somewhat positive result, since one might often make the assumption that the older generation is not as likely to use new or social media in teaching as the younger generation of teachers. However, according to the results of the present study, this is not the case since the older and more experienced teachers were as likely to use all types of media in language teaching as the younger and less experienced teachers.
Free time use of new media and social media seems to have a high correlation with the frequency of using the said media types in teaching. This result can be taken as encouraging
especially for those teachers who feel insecure about using types of new or social media in teaching. A solution for this could be that teachers would try out and get to know different types of media on their free time and once they feel that they have at least some basic knowledge about the media they can try it out in the classroom. This of course takes time, which was a concern for many teachers in the qualitative questions discussed in more detail in the following section. However, many media types can also be beneficial for the teachers on their free time, thus creating a situation where getting to know a media type is not done only for teaching purposes.
The self-evaluated pedagogical skills in using new media and social media also correlated with the frequency of use in language teaching. The result is understandable because if you feel confident about your skills and know that you can pedagogically take advantage of certain types of media, you will also use them in your teaching more often. However, the more traditional types of media, that is to say print and broadcast media, did not have a meaningful correlation with the frequency of use in teaching.