An Investigation into EFL Teachers’ Application of TPACK: Insights within a High School Context of a City in Vietnam

Abstract

Researches on examining teachers’ perception on TPACK (technology, pedagogy and content knowledge) have attracted scholars’ attention for the past few decades. This model has the function of investigating teachers’ knowledge of technology and its integration to pedagogy skill or teaching approach and teaching content in instructional environment. However, most of the research put an emphasis on pre-service teachers. Not many studies have been conducted to investigate the perceptions of in-service teachers’ TPACK. Besides, the results in these studies are mainly based on the self-reported data and the interview data, whereas very few studies use observation to qualify the data. The study, therefore, was conducted with aims to explore high school EFL teacher’s level of TPACK and how they experience it in the real teaching context. The study was designed as a mixed-method study. Accordingly, questionnaire and observation were used as collecting data instruments. Quantitative data were obtained from a questionnaire survey with the participation of seventy EFL teachers working at various high schools in a city, Vietnam. Eight participants were then selected for class observation. The study found the following main results. Firstly, teachers’ TPACK were highly perceived. In particular, all six TPACK clusters, namely TK (technology knowledge), TCK (technology content knowledge), CK (content knowledge), PCK (pedagogy content knowledge), TPK (technology pedagogy knowledge) and TPCK (technology pedagogy content knowledge) were rated at above average level. TK and PCK were the most positively perceived while TPCK was the least perceived. Next, qualitative data revealed that most participants had sound knowledge of TPACK integrated various technology tools in their teaching practices. The findings provided useful information as the basis for recommendations for the process of teaching and learning English at high schools despite unavoidable shortcomings due to time limitation and research scope.