Abstract:

Technology and especially mobile devices has filled the hands of students and teachers with new authentic material. In classrooms, technology has been integrated to promote active learning, providing flexibility in teaching. After the COVID-19 risk situation, education was forced to go online, and the use of online teaching materials was considered of high necessity. Despite that, paper-based materials are still mainly used, when the teachers return to normality, because they go back to their old habits of teaching in classroom with minimal use of technologies. Many researchers (Vukićević-Đorđević, 2016; Dennis, 2011; Corbeil, 2007) already claim that textbooks and notebooks will soon be conceived by the digital native learners as old-fashioned and unable to help them. In this light, the current paper aims to investigate the impact of interactive teaching and mobile learning in improving students’ participation, comprehension and focus during the learning process in ESL classrooms to suggest if the students are in need of electronic and online materials rather than paper-based books. For this purpose, a series of 12 45-minute lessons was implemented in a classroom environment with the explicit use of technological means by both the teacher and the students. The participants were 23 students of mixed learning abilities, aged from 12 to 14 years old, who were taught English as a Foreign Language and had an A2+ level in English according to the CEFR. During the implementation, a public-school classroom, equipped only with a projector and internet, was turned into a BYOD classroom to facilitate the explicit use of technology for both teaching and learning without any use of paper-based material. In this effort, the students used their own mobile devices (BYOD) in the classroom and the teaching process was based solely on presentations, videos, interactive whiteboard software, online activities, educational online/computer-based games and collaborative boards. For the data collection, a mixed method approach was followed to quantify the success factors of the instruction with no textbooks and gain deeper understanding on how students perceive the use of electronic/ online material and mobile devices in their learning regarding their participation, comprehension and focus during the in-classroom instruction. The results of the study were rather encouraging suggesting that electronic and online teaching material can multiply books’ advantages. In a BYOD classroom, boredom is excluded, and the use of various technological means for teaching and learning helps students focus on the fun side of learning without paying attention on how much they learn. The research concludes with suggestions for further investigation.

Keywords:

Interactive teaching, technology in classrooms, electronic material, online material, presentations, mobile learning, active learning, BYOD, focus.