User acceptance of ‘Bring your own device’ (BYOD) for language learning: Why and why not?

Gwendoline Guan and Juliana Chau
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hong Kong SAR, China

Gary Cheng
The Hong Kong Institute of Education
Hong Kong SAR, China

The practice of ‘Bring your own device’ (BYOD) originated in the business world whereby employees are encouraged to bring their personally owned devices — such as laptops, tablets and smartphones — to the workplace and use those devices to access corporate information and applications. BYOD practice has gained in popularity in the education sector in recent years. The United States and Australia, for instance, have introduced BYOD to their school systems as a way to minimize the cost of providing ongoing technological support for the students (Rackley & Viruru, 2014). Proponents of BYOD also believe that the use of personal devices enables teachers to give differential instruction to meet individual students’ learning needs, to promote student interaction and participation, and to make learning ubiquitous. However, research on students’ attitude towards using their own devices for learning, and on ways of incorporating personal devices into the curriculum, remains scarce, despite encouraging findings in preliminary studies on the issue (de Waard, 2013).

This paper reports on a pilot study of implementing BYOD pedagogy in the context of an English for Academic Purposes course at a Hong Kong tertiary institution. Data were collected from 40 students through pre- and post-questionnaires on students’ attitude towards and experience with using their own devices in this course. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to examine their perceptions of using their own devices for English learning and the changes they observed in the learning process.

The findings carry implications for language practitioners, curriculum developers and administrators interested or involved in BYOD pedagogy.