| Abstract: |
The knowledge of and attitudes toward modern educational media, specifically machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs), among teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) are an important factor in the process of EFL learning and teaching, and the ultimate learners' success or failure with the language.
Twenty-five in-service teacher-trainees doing their one-semester post-graduate study of TEFL in the School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, were asked about their experience of, and attitudes toward, electronic EFL dictionaries. Twelve yes-no-? questions were asked. The results of the questionnaire show that: (1) not a single teacher "has used a computer dictionary of English recently in class", even though most have access to one at home and at school, and few believe that it would disrupt the flow of the lesson, (2) teachers have rather superficial experience of MRDs, if at all, (3) those with no experience tend to have rather inflated expectations of MRDs' content and function.
If only 26 out of 712 EFL students in all types of schools in Poland have ever used an EFL MRD (Lew[1], forthcoming), some of the blame falls on the teachers whose meager skills and bad attitudes appear to be a serious challenge to the future of (computer-assisted) EFL in Poland. |