Internet Integration as Sociocultural Practices by Urban English Teachers in Malaysia

To tap into the potentials of online educational innovations, schools in Malaysia are working towards equipping classrooms with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to carry out technology-mediated web-based lessons. Teachers are also being trained and encouraged to integrate the Internet in their teaching. Where English teachers are concerned, to what extent and how have they used the Internet in their lessons? What are their problems in integrating the Internet in their teaching? This paper explores these questions from a sociocultural perspective, using a part of the data from a survey of 218 urban secondary school English teachers and a further interview with four volunteer teachers to supplement quantitative trends. The findings show that teachers' use of the Internet is mainly confined to appropriating and downloading online materials for offline class use. Actual teaching in a web-connected classroom is limited. Teachers' practices are discussed in relation to sociocultural constraints. These findings carry implications for the 21st century classroom, in Malaysia and other similar sociocultural contexts, where there is expectation for teaching and learning to be mediated by digital technologies.