The attitudes of student-teachers to the perceived usefulness of CALL in initial teacher education

The attitudes of student-teachers to Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) remains an under-explored topic in research literature. This mixed-methods study engaged student-teachers in focus group discussions at commencement and completion of Initial Teacher Education (ITE). These student-teachers were situated across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Student-teachers’ beliefs regarding the perceived value of CALL experienced a considerable transformation between initial and follow-up focus group interactions. Beginning student-teachers collectively portrayed CALL in a complimentary light, with 67.5% of participant dialogue positively coded via thematic analysis. This contrasts with follow-up student-teacher discourse, where only 38.55% of nodes in NVivo were positively coded. Overall, belief changes were most marked for positive categories of CALL. Thus, maintaining optimistic opinions to CALL could be a worthwhile endeavour to promote student-teacher acceptance of digital technologies in language learning.