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2.5 Interactive Whiteboards in English Language Teaching 
In the early 2000s ELT practitioners increasingly adopted the IWB and it was soon seen as an 
essential tool in the ELT classroom. However, this was primarily the result of pressure from 
the IWB manufacturers and the ELT publishers, rather than from teachers or pupils. 
Nevertheless, there has been an on-going debate whether the IWB is good or bad in the ELT 
classroom (Hockly, op cit). According to Hockly (ibid) the significant advantages with an 
IWB are that it motivates and engages pupils more in the learning process and classroom 
activities. Furthermore, according to Koenraad (2008:7) the IWB can also, compared to other 
ICT devices, create more opportunities for interactions and discussions in the classroom 
(Koenraad, 2008:7), which are vital parts in language learning (Swain, 1995), making the 
IWB the ultimate tool in ELT. Furthermore, the IWB unites all other technologies in one and 
it is a fully interactive tool that can bring together, text, images, audio, video and unlimited 
collections of resources from the Webb (Betcher and Lee, op cit). This interactivity has a 
positive effect on the pupils’ involvement and increases their motivation to learn English, 
which is, according to BECTA (op cit), claimed to be the primary benefit with the IWB. 
Additionally, Pennington (1996) claims that this benefit distinguishes the IWB from the 
computer in a positive way. The computer has been criticised for promoting segregation from 
others and supporting anti-social forms of behaviour, while the IWB brings people together 
and encourages communication. The interactivity extends the pupils’ communication skills, 
involving speaking and listening, which are two of the four language skills (Pennington, ibid). 
Harmer (2008:53-54) emphasises the importance of communication in language learning. He 
discusses the ‘focus on form’ instead of ‘focus on forms’ as a more effective way of learning 

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a language. This suggests that the pupils learn better if they engage in communicative 
language exercises that are meaning-based rather then focusing on every form one by one. 
When there is a focus on form the learning will occur more spontaneously (Harmer, ibid). 
With this said the interactivity and communication opportunities the IWB generates should be 
beneficial and improve pupils’ language learning.
Moreover, Glover et al. (op cit) also state that, to retain the pupils’ motivation and 
enthusiasm, interaction is an important factor that needs to be a part of the course of study.
The interaction has to occur between teachers and pupils, pupils and pupils and teachers and 
teachers (Glover et al, ibid). However, IWBs are not always used interactively; teachers 
sometimes have a tendency to use the IWB as a substitute for the traditional whiteboard. 
These teachers do not realise that a change in their methods and pedagogy is required to 
develop interactivity out of the IWB (Armstrong et al, 2005). Moreover, research findings 
show that foreign language teachers around the world are still in the initial stage of 
understanding and integrating the IWB technology into their classroom practice, to support 
the language learning processes 
(
Orr, 2008). Studies such as Cutrim Schmid (2008) show that 
the simplified access to multimedia resources has created a ‘show- and-tell’ teaching style, 
which results in lessons revolving around the IWB instead of the pupils (Cutrim Schmid, 
ibid). It is suggested that the reason for this is the IWB’s relatively new role in the ELT 
classroom. Also, a second factor might be that up until recently there has been a lack of high 
quality, subject-specific training on how to use this technological device in the language 
teaching (Cutrim Schmid, 2011). Moreover, the absence of sufficient training is something 
that the IWB critic Gavin Dudeney brings up as one of the reasons to why he does not believe 
that the IWB will succeed in ELT. He also claims that the lack of available ELT content is 
another factor as to why the IWB will not succeed in the ELT classroom– he argues that the 
relatively small amount of purpose-made available material is of poor quality (Dudeney, 
2006). Furthermore, other people seemed to agree with Dudeney’s second and third point; 
they state that the major challenge for teachers to use the IWB successfully is due to the lack 
of suitable material and supported training (Dudeney, 2006). Consequently, this led to the 
establishment of the European Union-founded project – Interactive Technologies in Language