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teachers as resistant to technology?Despite the importance of improving teachers’ digital competence emphasized internationally in policy documents such as the DigCompEdu framework, the expected educational revolution might still and often be waiting to occur. Teaching practitioners are frequently branded as “resistant to technology, Luddites and risk-averse” and seem to be under a more general suspicion of failing to achieve success in improving teaching and learning with digital technologies (Howard & Mozejko 2015: 311). The discrepancy between the policymaking and teachers’ resistance has been documented by research (Tallvid 2016; Watty et al. 2016; Kamilah & Anugerahwati 2017), and there is an established gap between policies and the actual use of digital technologies in teaching and learning (Madsen et al. 2018). It would be too short-sighted, however, to simply blame teachers for their alleged deficiencies, as other factors also play a decisive role for the digital turn in education, including school equipment and access to further training opportunities. Indeed, the empirical study will show that any claim related to teachers’ resistance to technology needs critical challenging.

Yet, it must be emphasized that the effectiveness of implementing information and communication technology (ICT) in schools may rely on “how well teachers and future teachers are able to implement and use ICT in an effective and appropriate manner for teaching and learning” (Røkenes & Krumsvik 2014), apart from students’ digital competence. A study conducted by Krumsvik et al. (2013, cited in Røkenes & Krumsvik 2014) involving 17,529 students and 2,524 teachers in Norwegian secondary schools found that teachers’ digital competence and students’ learning outcomes are strongly correlated. This study highlights the importance of the teacher as a role model with regard to digital competence, and it further implies that the development of digital competence in student teachers needs to begin during their teacher education.

the role of attitudes and self-efficacyApart from having digital skills, research indicates that teachers need to have positive attitudes toward technologies and experience self-efficacy in using them to become self-confident users and role models for students (Milbrath & Kinzie 2000). Research has also shown that the actual behavior of using technology is positively influenced by the attitude toward it as well as by the individual’s self-perceptions of their competence (Yeung et al. 2012: 1319). Although the DigCompEdu provides a good framework for teachers to self-evaluate their digital competence, it barely addresses the relationship between student teachers’ self-perceptions of digital competence and their actual attitudes toward digital technologies as well as the possible factors influencing their attitudes.

In this regard, the study presented here aims to fill this gap and advance the understanding of research in future students’ expertise and attitudes toward digital technologies (DT) in EFL education. Specifically, the following three research questions (RQ) are being sought:

 RQ 1: What are the general attitudes and the degree of their perceived digital competence of student teachers toward the use of digital technologies in ELT?

 RQ 2: What are the relationships between the self-perceptions of student teachers’ digital competence and their attitudes toward digital technologies?

 RQ3: To what extent do factors including age, gender, school types, and teaching experience influence the attitudes of student teachers toward DT?