FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING IN A DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT: TEACHERS' ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS

Abstract

Taking into account that traditional foreign language teaching is being moved to a virtual environment, the obligations of teachers are changing constantly. Their main tasks are to accept new technologies and develop their digital literacy. However, whether teachers will apply ICT in teaching practice depends on their personal and pedagogical attitudes and beliefs. When teachers’ attitudes and beliefs are positive, new technologies become one of their important teaching materials. The opposite of this, with negative attitudes and beliefs about applying ICT in teaching, teachers reject them and do not enable students to acquire new skills and knowledge in a virtual environment. In that sense, we wanted to examine the foreign language teachers’ attitudes about the use of ICT digital tools in Serbia. The results are obtained by the inferential analysis which is used to confirm or refute hypothesis about the possible conditioning of the identified factors. The results showed that positive attitudes of teachers have a positive effect on learning in a digital environment, but also that positive attitudes increase significantly with their education for the use of ICT. Finally, it was shown that teachers employed at the university have more negative attitudes about the advantages of language learning in a digital environment, in contrast to teachers employed in primary and secondary schools and in foreign language schools. In support of this, it is observed that training in this field is also necessary for teachers who work at faculties in order to increase awareness of the value of new technologies in the teaching process.