Iranian Novice and Experienced EFL Teachers’ Perspectives on Challenges and Affordance of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) in an EFL Context

From an ecolinguistic perspective, affordance and technology might be issues of great concern in recent decades in computer assisted language learning (CALL). The present study was conducted to investigate Iranian novice and experienced EFL teachers’ perspectives on challenges and affordance of mobile assisted language learning (MALL) in an EFL context. To this end, a total of 80 EFL teachers at different universities in Iran were randomly sampled. The data were collected through a validated 4-point Likert-scale questionnaire including two sections, each section of which focused on a particular aspect of MALL, including items evaluating EFL teachers’ attitudes toward the implementation of mobile phones and items exploring EFL teachers’ perspectives on the challenges to the use of MALL instruction. The results revealed that the novice EFL teachers significantly agreed more than experienced teachers with the idea that MALL based instruction should be used in Iranian EFL context. The results also indicated that the experienced EFL teachers significantly “strongly agreed” more than novice teachers concerning the idea that MALL based education created challenges in Iranian EFL. In general, the findings suggest that both novice and experienced teachers had positive attitudes towards MALL instruction. However, there are some challenges which make teaching and learning less efficient and these obstacles need to be tackled by authorities. Implications have also been introduced in the paper.