The Reality of Malaysian ESL Teachers’ ICT Pedagogical Practices: Challenges and Suggestions

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Teachers of English as a second language (ESL) are nowadays exploring the integration of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools into their Higher Order Thinking (HOT) pedagogical practices. However, there are various challenges in using ICT to teach Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), as it is only explored superficially. This study investigates the challenges encountered by ESL teachers when using ICT to promote HOTS. Meanwhile it aims to provide a set of guidelines to help teachers in teaching HOTS through utilising ICT. The framework of the research is grounded on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (2011). 30 ESL teachers from 5 schools selected by the ESL Master Teachers’ affiliation, participated in answering to the questionnaires. Meanwhile, 5 ESL teachers from each school were involved in focus group discussions (which were used to triangulate the data obtained from the questionnaires. The FGDs lasted for 20 minutes per session, and they were conducted based on the availability of the ESL teachers. The collected data were analysed in the form of tables and direct excerpts. The findings support that ESL teachers face multiple challenges such as time constraint, poor internet connection, and lack of ICT tools while using ICT to promote HOTS in schools. The findings of the present study are in-line with Malaysia’s vision in shifting the focus of education into the acquisition of HOTS. ESL teachers benefit from this research as they can improve on their teaching pedagogies based on the suggestions presented in this study.