Attitudes of Higher Secondary English Teachers Towards The Use of Computer and the Internet

Abstract

The global spread of Information and Communication Technology has created the great impacts in all daily activities of human life. Education sector including Language Teaching can not be isolated from the new changes in education system of the world. Considering the issues of implementing the technologies in educational and curricular activities, this study has focused on the end users' attitudes towards the modern communication and information tools: computer and the Internet. This study is has been carried out to study the attitudes of Higher Secondary English Language Teachers of Kathmandu valley and their perception on the basis of their personal characteristics, relative computer and internet advantages, cultural perception, computer competence and the availability of computer and the internet. The study has concluded with the findings that majority of the teachers have positive attitudes towards the computer and the internet. Although less than twenty five percent English teachers of Higher Secondary School in Kathmandu valley are still away from computer and the internet access, they are aware of use of computer and the Internet and have the positive attitudes towards the use of them in curricular activities. All teachers are interested to increase the computer and the internet access in the future. This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter is the introductory part and sets the background information about the impact of computer and the internet in education to national integral development. It also contains the review of the related literature, objectives of the study and significance of the study. Second chapter carries out the methodology used in the study. This chapter show the steps adopted in conducting the research. Sources of data, sampling procedures, instrumentation, and process of data collection, research design, research variables, reliability, validity and limitations of the study are the main subjects included in the chapter. The third chapter explores the data presentation, analysis and interpretation of the selected data. Computer assisted analysis has been adopted in presenting the data. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) has been used for quantitative and descriptive data analysis and NVivo-7 has been used to interpret the qualitative data (interviews and observation) in this chapter. All descriptive data have been presented on table format and detail explanation has been used to interpret the qualitative data. This chapter covers the overall tasks to get the objectives of the study. Finally, the fourth chapter covers the findings of the study and its pedagogical implications.