Teachers’ Collaborative Reflections on Classroom Materials: From Traditional Consumers to Digital Materials Developers and Teacherpreneurs

Abstract

L2 teachers, no longer considered to be predominantly passive coursebook consumers, act as mediators between pedagogy and materials in the current era of technology-assisted language instruction and should be empowered to digitalize language learning materials to meet the immediate needs of the digital generation. In this study, we aimed to investigate L2 teachers’ collaborative reflections on the current gaps in their classroom coursebook that could be bridged by the purposeful use of digital tools and address their attitudes towards their changing roles as digital materials developers. The findings demonstrated that, in their critical reflections, from a pedagogical perspective, the teachers pinpointed the dominance of passive language usage, the absence of personalized strategy-based instruction, and the lack of interactive content in the coursebook. From a task design perspective, they referred to the dominance of edutainment-free tasks, the prevalence of artificial peer tasks, the lack of multimodal scenario-based tasks, and the absence of adaptive feedback. The teachers further highlighted their shifting roles. As digital materials developers, they could create digital content for the “digital natives,” make digital mini-lessons for classrooms, attend project-based training courses, and co-produce digital content and tasks with students’ assistance. As digital teacherpreneurs, they could run private social media-based businesses, join Edu-Tech co-working spaces, and produce digital artifacts in edutainment centers. As digital materials designers, they could collaborate with computer-assisted language learning (CALL) stakeholders and do interdisciplinary projects in virtual communities. This study promises implications for L2 teachers, teacher educators, and materials developers.