ICT Competence and Needs of Turkish EFL Instructors: The Role of Gender, Institution and Experience

Abstract

This study aimed to scrutinize Information and Communication Technology (ICT) competence of Englishas a Foreign Language (EFL) instructors in Turkey and their professional development (PD) needs inICT in relation to the variables of gender, institution, teaching experience, and their past PD experience.This study also explored the types of training sources EFL instructors preferred to further their PD inICT. The data were collected by administering a questionnaire of ICT competence and PD needs ofteachers. The participants were 193 EFL instructors teaching at various universities in Turkey. The datawere analyzed by using IBM SPSS Statistics (i.e. Mean, Standard Deviation, ANOVA, Mann-Whitney Uand Kruskal-Wallis test). The results indicated that EFL instructors perceived their current ICTcompetence as low in the seven major areas. However, gender and previous PD experience in ICT playeda role in their perceived ICT competence. The study also revealed that regardless of gender, type ofinstitution, previous PD experience in ICT, and teaching experience, EFL instructors reported a mediumand higher amount of ICT training needs. The most preferred modes of PD in ICT were immersion orinternship activities while the least preferred modes of PD were workshops/conferences/seminars. Theimplications of the study are also presented.© 2019 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).