Abstract:

E-learning has the power to change the way everyone learns and provides an accessible learning environment with high quality. However, one should not ignore the socioeconomic and cultural inequalities that play an essential role in access to and use of modern technologies. This study reports an investigation into English language instructors' perspective toward using social media technologies to support English teaching. This study interviewed (N=18) English language instructors at a university in Saudi Arabia. NVivO software was used to analyse the qualitative data. The findings indicated that the majority of the instructors (N=14) had a positive attitude toward using social media technologies to support English language teaching. Female instructors were more positive to use social media learning tools than male ones. The findings revealed that only young female instructors with a few years of teaching experiences and no previous technology training were found to use social media platforms formally as supportive tools. According to Roger's (1995) adopters classifications, the majority of instructors are within the groups of Innovators, Early Adopters, Early and Late majority. Further research is needed to explore the relationship between instructors' age, teaching experience, computers self-efficacy and their use of social media learning tools to support the language teaching.

Keywords:

Innovation, Attitude, technology, e-learning, social media, gender divide, adopters classification.