Asian Research Thesis Index

Abstract

This qualitative case study is an attempt to explore the policy emphasis on the use of ICT in education and the experiences of school-based stakeholders regarding their attempts to integrate lCT in learning and teaching of English in a public sector secondary school of Chagai, Baluchistan. The research sample consisted of six students of class 9, six students of class 10, two English language teachers (ELTs) and the head teacher of the school. Focused group discussion, semi-structured interviews, classroom observation, document and artifact analysis tools were used for data collection. Three questions were developed to answer the research focus: 1) what kind of emphasis has the national education policies historically placed on the use of information technology in the learning and teaching process? 2) What are the experiences of the school-based stakeholders (the head teacher, English language teachers and students) of integrating lCT in the process of teaching and learning English of a public sector secondary school? and 3) In what ways does the policy emphasis on the use of ICT in education/teaching and learning corroborate with the experiences of school-based stakeholders? The findings of the study suggest that all education policies and plans, including the current Balochistan Education Sector Plan (2013-2018) consistently emphasize on ICT integration in education. Experiences of school- based stakeholders highlighted that they were integrating lCT in learning and teaching of English by sharing websites, using ICT as a medium of communication and connection, ICT as a tool to enhance students' motivation, engagement and lCT to give rise to student-centred learning. Moreover, school- based stakeholders were also experiencing few challenges. Those challenges were lack of awareness regarding policy intentions, the poor ICT skills of ELT, lack of technological pedagogical content knowledge, lack of technical and financial support and lack of the head teacher and ELTs' voices in education policy. Public-private partnership and community participation were two of the strategies being used by the school-based stakeholders to overcome the challenges faced. However, it was evident from the findings of this study that policy emphasis on lCT integration in learning and teaching was not translated in school-based stakeholders' experiences. It could be referred to as poor policy implementation. To overcome this poor policy implementation, the study recommends using UNESCO Institute for Statistics's (2009) indicators for lCT in education for monitoring the progress throughout that is from conceptualization to implementation and evaluation phases. This will certainly help assessing success

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