Challenges of teacher education programs in Thailand: Voices of CALL instructors from an under-represented context

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all schools and universities have been required to adopt an exclusively online instruction. Because online instruction was still something new, there have been certain challenges faced by CALL instructors teaching in teacher education programs. The aim of this study was to voice the chal-lenges they faced and how they would adapt themselves and the ICT course they had to teach. The participants were eight CALL instructors from eight “relatively new” Rajabhat Universities (formerly teacher colleges) across Thailand. Four of them were CALL instructors with strong ICT backgrounds, whereas the other four had strong ELT backgrounds. The semi-structured interview technique was employed for data collection. The interview results indicated that both groups of CALL instructors tended to have more problems with both pedagogical knowledge (PK) and pedagog-ical content knowledge (PCK). Unsurprisingly, those with strong ELT backgrounds are also faced with technological knowledge (TK). Additionally, instructors’ teaching experiences contributed to their online instruction management. The more teaching experiences they had, the fewer problems they would have. A few CALL instruc-tors suggested that the ICT course will be more successful and effective when it is co-taught by both ICT and ELT instructors.