Mobile assisted language learning: teachers' perspectives on EFL classes in public schools at Altamira-PA

This research seeks to investigate teacher´s perspectives about the use of mobile phones in language classes. It is characterized as a case study classified as exploratory and descriptive one. The use of mobile devices for educational purpose is called mobile learning and it receives the nomenclature of Mobile Language Learning when it comes to language learning purposes. As a way of having an overview of how these tools are being used in teaching practices and how students make use of them in classroom through teacher’s perspectives. For this goal, this work had as literature review the main authors in Mobile Language Learning such as Kukulska-Hulme & Traxler (2015), Burston (2014), Cheon et al. (2012) and other relevant ones in the field of mobile learning. This survey was carried out with six English teachers from two high schools of the public system education. It is structured in three sections: the first one presents a brief history of the field and discusses the concept of MALL. In the second section it is discussed about the use of mobile apps in language learning, their advantages and challenges of integrating them in class and the main experiments using apps carried out in Brazil. Lastly, for methodology, it was used a semi-opened questionnaire to collect data as well as a content analysis approach which generated two categories from the study field. The results show that most of teachers make use of these tools in their classroom; it provided a better understanding regarding the benefit promoted from these tools in teaching and learning as well as the main challenges faced to integrate them.