Abstract—Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) has
emerged as an important domain since mobile devices are
widely used by the current generation of learners. This study
emphasizes that the successful implementation of MALL for
language education relies heavily on its acceptance by teachers.
This study intends to investigate the acceptance of using MALL
for teaching English among college EFL teachers in China. The
Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), a frequently used model
in technology acceptance studies for m-learning settings, was
adopted in this study. A questionnaire survey was administered
to collect data on teachers’ demographic information and
acceptance of MALL. The respondents were 30 in-service
college-level EFL teachers from universities in Yunnan, China,
and the data are analyzed using SPSS. Respondents’ MALL
acceptance level, their demographic variables associated with
intentions to use MALL, and the relationship of Perceived
Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEU) with Behavioral
Intention (BI) were investigated. The results suggested that
Chinese EFL teachers have a rather high level of MALL
acceptance. Their BI to use MALL differs according to the
teaching experience. Both PU and PEU significantly influenced
BI which further predicted the Actual Use (AU) of MALL. The
findings of the study provide insights into the usefulness of
TAM in predicting the acceptance of MALL among college EFL
instructors and may assist in explaining the factors influencing
their intentions to utilize mobile technology for language
teaching.
Index Terms—EFL teachers, m-learning, mobile-assisted
language learning (MALL), technology acceptance model
(TAM).
Zengfang Lin is with the School of Education, Taylor’s University,
Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia, and School of Foreign Languages, Dali
University, Dali, Yunnan, China (e-mail: lilolin@yeah.net).
Ain Nadzimah Abdullah and Arshad Abdul Samad are with the School of
Education, Taylor’s University, Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia (e-mail:
ainnadzimah.abdullah@taylors.edu.my, arshad.abdsamad@taylors.edu.my).
Cite: Zengfang Lin, Ain Nadzimah Abdullah, and Arshad Abdul Samad, "Exploring Chinese EFL Teachers’ Acceptance of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL)," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 11, pp. 1172-1178, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).