engleski

Future Teachers’ Attitudes on Using Robots as Educational Tools

The new Croatian curricular reform 'School for Life' has been in use since the 2019/2020 school year. In its original idea, the reform was influenced by the constructivists approach, where students are in the focus of the educational process and they need to create and use objects which can stimulate learning by doing and development of abstract thinking. The reform also supports implementing and using new digital educational materials. One that might become common in the future is the educational robot. This preliminary study aimed to question future teachers’ attitudes towards implementing the robot as an educational tool into English language teaching (ELT). We set out to investigate whether the participants expressed their readiness to use the robot, and in which way they felt comfortable using it. The research participants were future English language teachers (N = 70) who, as part of their studies, participated in a workshop in which they put together and learned to program a drawing robot. The study was carried out in two parts – a semi-structured interview with the focus group (N = 6), and an online questionnaire (N = 54). The results show that the participants expressed positive attitudes toward using the robot in ELT (especially after being educated about it), highlighting some benefits (e.g. increase in the students' motivation and confidence), but also disadvantages (e.g. it is difficult to maintain and to program the robot, its cost). Even though the educational robot is a rather new educational tool in Croatia, with the appropriate training for teachers and future English language teachers about its usage, we conclude that the robot is more than welcome in the educational process, and it should be implemented in ELT.

constructivism ; educational robots ; English language learning and teaching ; future English language teachers’ attitudes ; robot as an educational tool

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