Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
IV. International Conference Research in Applied Linguistics ICRAL2020, Bursa, Türkiye, 24 - 26 Ekim 2020, ss.29, (Özet Bildiri)
Information and communication technologies (ICT) are immensely intertwined with educational,
economic and social activities and continue to promise tremendous innovation and development
opportunities, provided that enabling conditions are available (European Commission, 2013). In this
context, the existence of digital inequalities poses a major threat to the fulfilment of ICT potential. The
term “digital divide” has traditionally referred to inequalities in physical access to computers and the
Internet. van Dijk (2005) has reconceptualised the theory of digital divide to better refer to its
multifaceted construct and suggested four successive levels of access to ICT as motivational, physical
(or material), skills and usage. He has posited that problems regarding the ICT access progressively shift
from motivational and physical access to skills and usage access and digital divide might occur at any
levels of access to digital technologies.
Studies on digital divide have majorly focused on students’ physical access to digital technologies.
However, research on teachers’ and specifically higher education instructors’ access to technology is
scarce. The present study reports on preliminary research forming part of a larger scale study and aims
to address higher education instructors’ access to digital technologies at four levels. The participants
were 44 EFL instructors from three private universities in Istanbul, Turkey. Analysis of the data coming
from the Faculty’s Information and Communication Technology Access (FICTA) scale (Soomro, Kale,
Curtis, Akcaoglu, & Bernstein, 2018) revealed the following findings: (1) The participating instructors
had high motivation to adopt digital technologies- more endogenously than exogenously; (2) majority
of them had a physical access to technologies such as laptop computers, Internet and printers both at
home and/or on-campus; (3) the instructors’ perceived abilities in three types of skills (operational,
informational and strategic) appeared to be quite high; and (4) the instructors had a relatively high level
of general usage and instructional usage access to ICT. The findings gained from the present study would
provide valuable insight for the planning and implementation of professional development experiences
for university level EFL instructors.