Investigating the Pre-service English Teachers' Perceptions of the Use of Smart Board Technology

The current case study attempted to investigate the English Language Teaching (ELT) students’ perceptions regarding the use of smart board (SB) technology from two different perspectives: i) as current students and ii) as prospective teachers of English language. The target population of the study was the students enrolled in the ELT undergraduate program of the Foreign Language Education (FLE) department, at Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU). A total number of 100 pre-service teachers of English responded to the questionnaire and 14 students volunteered to participate in the interviews. Moreover, a triangulation of methods was applied to collect quantitative and qualitative data through the use of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The questionnaire consisted of 26 items presented on 5-Likert scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree and included biographical questions and four open ended questions. It revealed a result of 88% of reliability on Cronbach's alpha scale of the SPSS program. The findings suggested that the pre-service teachers of English at the ELT program were positive about the smart board use and would like to integrate the tool in their future careers; however, the students specified their preferences over the tool’s use and identified some shortcomings. The students believed that the smart board can be motivating, interesting, effective, fun, amusing, more convenient and easier to use, but they did not like the excessive use of PowerPoint presentations on the smart boards. Their responses also pointed out a lack of technological knowledge (TK) of both teachers and students to use the smart board and technical issues which caused waste of time during lessons. The study is believed to be a basis for conducting more future research about the utilization of smart board technology inside the university’s classrooms. The study can also provide an evidence for the administrators to invest more in smart board technology. On the other hand, further research can focus on the development of alternative ways to motivate the students and create the appropriate atmosphere for the utilization of the smart board technology to prevent somehow negative or unfavorable perceptions against it. Keywords: smart boards, pre-service teachers, perceptions, teacher knowledge, technological knowledge