ELT Lecturers’ Digital Technology Integration Levels via SAMR Model

It is admitted that all walks of life densely depend on the functional employment of technology in the 21st-century competitive world. The lion's share goes to language education since the era of digitalization requires a shared language. To keep up with the digitalized world, digital technology integration into language classes is vitally significant. In addition, digitalized language education ensures continuous education under the pandemic and devastating natural catastrophes conditions—the 21st century demands a higher level of awareness and practicality regarding technology facilitation apart from higher-order skills. By bearing in mind this cognitive approach and awareness, the present study investigated the digital technology integration levels of the English Language Teaching lecturers via Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR) Model. The study employed a correlational design via a Likert-type questionnaire with 243 English Language Teaching lecturers employed at 20 universities in Turkey. Universities were selected depending on the statistical data of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics. The findings pointed out that synchronous teaching platforms were primarily utilized as overhead projectors, which stressed the superior usage of Substitution level without lecturers’ compelling interferences to the activities. Reconstructing either the framework or the content of the existing materials was also practiced densely under the Modification level but sequenced after the Redefinition level, which is time and effort-demanding, and practiced heavily after the Substitution level. The Augmentation level was the least practiced since participants considered that decreasing or increasing the number of mechanic activities is less beneficial than Modification and Redefinition level-appropriate practices. Additionally, while participants’ digital technology integration levels were discovered to be related to their gender, background education, and online teaching experiences; seniority and age were not discovered to be significant signals of the participants’ digital technology integration levels.