Abstract

Rapid technological advances in communication technologies and computational power are altering the nature of
knowledge, skills, talents and the know-how of individuals. A CD-ROM dictionary is an interesting and effective
teaching tool, which captures pre-service teachers’ interest and does much more than just translates especially with
the availability of a variety of resources to support language learning and teaching. This research reports on the
study undertaken to determine whether some factors (gender and year of study) affect pre-service TESOL teachers’
attitudes towards using CD-ROM dictionaries. The theoretical framework for the study is drawn from Diffusion of
innovations’ theory by Rogers (1995) and TAM model by Davis (1986; 1989). A modified questionnaire is
employed to obtain the necessary information on pre-service TESOL teachers’ backgrounds, their attitudes towards
using CD-ROM dictionaries, and certain factors. A total of (80) pre-service TESOL teacher at a Malaysian higher
educational institution was purposively selected for the quantitative data. The findings exhibit that the respondents’
gender does not affect their attitudes towards using CD-ROM dictionaries. However, a significant difference is
revealed, through employing one-way analysis of group variance (ANOVA), in the mean scores of pre-service
TESOL teachers’ attitudes among the first, second and third year. Finally, it is concluded that the CD-ROM
dictionary is a way of encoding all relevant information associated with lexical entries in a manner easily accessible
to users.

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