Pre-service English Teachers' Acceptance and Use of Social Networks for Teaching Purposes

Abstract

Online learning opportunities provide students with a chance to have education regardless of time and space. Accordingly, pre-service teachers should be familiar with the use of social networks for both their own learning and also for teaching purposes. In this way, they can utilise social networks efficiently to improve their teaching and the first step in this is the acceptance and attitudes. Accordingly, this study aims to unearth pre-service English teachers’ acceptance and use of online social networks for teaching purposes. 140 pre-service English teachers studying at two state universities in Istanbul and Sakarya in the academic year of 2017-2018 make up the participants. The participants are selected through convenience sampling. As for data collection, The Scale of Acceptance and Use of Social Networks for teaching Purposes, developed by Kuzu-Demir and Akbulut (2017), was used. The data collected through this scale was analysed using percentage, frequency, independent sample t-test and variance analysis. The findings show that the acceptance and use of social networks for teaching purposes is high and the participants have a high acceptance for the use of them for teaching purposes. Moreover, the level of acceptance for 3 of the subcomponents (performance expectancy, effort expectancy and behavioural intention) are found to be high while it is medium for social influence.