THE USE OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE

Innovative teaching material is said to increase the quality of the teaching-learning process and more specifically, illustrated interactive e-books can be considered strategic resources to motivate students and involve their active participation. Nevertheless, it is necessary that teachers apply the right criteria to evaluate the efficacy of materials. In this respect, the training of pre-service teachers in higher education is essential.The objective of this investigation is twofold: on the one hand, we intend to deepen into the perception of pre-service teachers on the use of ICT in education. Secondly, we want to contribute to the ongoing debate on the effectiveness of higher education to enhance awareness in the use of mobile devices for teaching. We carried out an exploratory study by administering the Intrapersonal Technology Integration Scale (Niederhauser and Perkmen, 2008) on a population of 43 pre-service teacher training students of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid to gauge their perceived self-efficacy, performance, selfevaluative and social outcome expectations, and interest on the use of technology in schools. Based on these results, we designed a case study research with 13 participants, who undertook a workshop on interactive ebooks for second language teaching. At this stage, we applied ad-hoc pre- and post-questionnaires. Although the sample was composed by digital natives, who claim to have good ICT skills and believe that multimedia resources can be strategic to improve the quality of their teaching, the results reveal that the majority consider not having sufficient training to effectively handle innovative resources. Nonetheless, pre-service training in higher education can develop their critical thinking skills. More specifically, the participants showed deeper levels of reflection after the workshop, which indicates this impacted on their views on mobile devices and interactive e-books.