EFL Students’ Perceptions of Discussion-based Activities by Using Mobile Phone Technology

Humans require to help each other in social life. From this aspect, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity of educational aids signified a change in the pedagogical methods. In this regard, the priority of launching online education was high on the agenda in Iran and throughout the world. The purpose of the study was to find the Iranian EFL university students' perceptions regarding the use of mobile phone technologies in online discussion classes and compare their perceptions with their instructional practices in this regard. Thus, in a qualitative study, the researchers used convenience sampling and out of 133 Law students of the Islamic Azad University (IAU), ten students were selected as participants of this study. To obtain the required data, semi-structured interviews were made among participants of the study to find their perceptions regarding the mobile phone technology use over the discussion-based classes. On the other hand, regarding the observation part, 3 EFL reading classes were observed. Qualitative results for semi-structured interviews and class observations demonstrated that IAU students reflected their interest in conducting comparative translation activities to develop reading comprehension skills over legal texts based on cooperative and collaborative reading strategies through online discussion classes. Findings of the study can be useful for some people who can benefit from the results namely administrative executives in the ministry of education to revise their curriculum, university teachers to use the results of the study in their syllabuses and university students to use the findings in their learning procedure.