International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 120

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES SPRING 2016 The Impact of Information Communication and Technology on Students' Academic Performance: Evidence from Indonesian EFL Classrooms Arzal Biodata: Arzal is one of the academics at the Department of English Education, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, State University of Gorontalo, Indonesia. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He obtained his Master of Applied Linguistics from the University of Melbourne. Email: [email protected] Abstract The present study examined the impact of Information Communication Technology [ICT] on a group of university students' academic performance in an Indonesian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. As the platform of the ICT usage in this current study, English learning websites was used as the independent variable. Academic performance (students' score on pre and post test) was used the dependent variable. The participants in the study were 60 students of the Department of Public Health at the State University of Gorontalo, Indonesia, i.e an experimental group of 30 students (n=30) and a control group of 30 students (n=30). They took English courses as one of the compulsory subjects in the university curriculum. This study used a mixed method of a quasi-experimental and a qualitative interview approaches. Based on the result of the quantitative method of data collection, t-tests of this study indicated that students in the experiment group performed significantly better than the students in the control group. Test results also showed that there was a significant difference between students' score on the pre- and post-test. The students' score in the post test and post test in the control group, however, were not significantly different. As interview results showed, participants expressed their positive learning experience with technologies, growing motivation in English learning, and positive feeling and confidence on their language performance. Key words: ICT, English for Foreign Language, English learning websites Introduction The demand for teachers to be confident and competent users of ICT for their personal and professional lives is continually growing due to rapid changes in Information Communication technology (ICT). Teachers of English are facing a growing pressure to be more professional and highly capable of creating more engaging classrooms in order to respond to their students' needs in the digital era. ICT integration, therefore, should be an integral part of their teaching instructions (Hubbard, 2013). Over the past few decades, numerous studies have confirmed the benefits of ICT in language teaching and learning. The effective use of technology in teaching and learning increases the benefits of ICT to enable students to become active learners and to develop their problem solving, critical-thinking, and creativity skills (Hubbard, 2013; Jung, 2006; Kean, Embi, & Yunus, 2012; Klimova & Semradova, 2012). In addition, ICT offers students and teachers a more flexible and broader access to 120 | P a g e