This literature review focuses the research conducted on Information and Communication Technology in English as a Foreign Language Teaching and Learning. It reviews various aspects of ICT integration, ICT tools, barriers and challenges to ICT integration, teachers’ perceptions and views about ICT and advantages and benefits of ICT integration in education. The factors effecting pre-service and in-service teachers and student teachers’ perceptions, views and confidence about ICT integration are also discussed and analyzed. This review further discusses the gaps in the studies and establishes a theoretical background for further studies specifically in Oman.

This study explains the emergence of virtual classrooms as an online language learning (OLL) instruction method. There is clarification of how virtual classroom systems operate, followed by a discussion of the benefits of learning in these environments. Private corporations are capitalizing on OLL and generating an estimated global gross income of 86 billion USD. While these corporations likely create quality educational materials that are of interest to the student, the materials presented in these platforms are currently not regulated, and, while some companies follow CEFR guidelines, there is no guarantee whether they meet the standards of education boards in the public sector. We surveyed 35 OLL teachers who teach English in virtual classrooms for their perceptions and opinions in working in this environment. Not only did we discover that over 50 percent of the online teachers who participated have also been students, which is of interest because they have both teaching and learning experience in virtual classrooms, but also that these teachers generally believe that teaching English online in virtual classrooms creates a positive teaching environment for both the teacher and the student. The participants generally feel they get to know the students better in virtual classrooms than in other teaching environments. The teachers also perceive that students in virtual classrooms learn at the same rate or faster than in traditional classrooms and that, not only would they like to see more subjects offered online, but they also generally believe that online learning in virtual classrooms may be an alternative learning method to replace traditional classroom learning and home-schooling in most subjects. Continued attention should be paid to the educational opportunities in virtual classrooms, not just for OLL, but for the emergence of other curricula as well.

This study aims to perform a quantitative analysis of the portrayal of gender in the nursing textbook used at the University of Buraimi in Oman. The study sought to examine gender-related categories, such as images, names, pronouns, words of address, and jobs, through the use of quantitative content analysis. The study findings suggest that, to some extent the nursing textbook exhibits a state of gender equilibrium and parity. The textbook displayed females as more visible than males in images and job categories. In contrast, males were more prominent in domains related to names, pronouns, and forms of address. In general, the school textbook exhibited a fair and impartial representation of both genders to a certain degree. The findings of this current research article are anticipated to assist authors in developing instructional materials that demonstrate a more balanced portrayal of genders within the curriculum.

This paper aims to analyze gender bias in the Islamic education school textbooks- Grade 3 used in all public schools in Oman. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses are used to investigate the following categories: images, occupational roles, names, adjectives, and gender firstness. Study findings show that gender bias is still strongly visible and ingrained in the four Islamic education school textbooks used in Grade 3. Men were dominant in almost all school textbooks. Men, for example, were strongly more visible than women in the following categories: images, occupational roles, names, and gender firstness in most textbooks. Women, on the other hand, were more visible than men in only one Islamic education textbook (Part 1, Semester 2) in the category related to gender firstness. The study findings also show that traditional occupational roles of men and women are still present in textbooks. In general, the Islamic education school textbooks used in all public schools in Oman confirm the findings of other previous studies in terms of the presence of gender bias against women in school curricula. The findings of the present study should help book writers promote gender equality and fight gender-biased against women in school textbooks around the world. This paper aims to analyze gender bias in the Islamic education school textbooks- Grade 3 used in all public schools in Oman. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses are used to investigate the following categories: images, occupational roles, names, adjectives, and gender firstness. Study findings show that gender bias is still strongly visible and ingrained in the four Islamic education school textbooks used in Grade 3. Men were dominant in almost all school textbooks. Men, for example, were strongly more visible than women in the following categories: images, occupational roles, names, and gender firstness in most textbooks. Women, on the other hand, were more visible than men in only one Islamic education textbook (Part 1, Semester 2) in the category related to gender firstness. The study findings also show that traditional occupational roles of men and women are still present in textbooks. In general, the Islamic education school textbooks used in all public schools in Oman confirm the findings of other previous studies in terms of the presence of gender bias against women in school curricula. The findings of the present study should help book writers promote gender equality and fight gender-biased against women in school textbooks around the world.

YouTube has become a significant but largely unstudied forum for public intellectual two-way conversations on AI in education as video has become a ubiquitous medium for communicating ideas. In a world dominated by video as a communication medium, YouTube has become a prominent location for two-way ideas exchanges about artificial intelligence (AI) in education that is not yet well studied as a site of discursive production. These conversations have the potential to influence and shape access to AI in education on an even larger scale than the scholarly publications they would enable, and these influences are evident in the policy, practice, and teacher identity for which these images of the future of education are constructed. The three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model by Fairclough (1992, 2003) is applied to a Corpus consisting of 20 (171,676 words) high-reach and purposively selected panel discussions (8) on YouTube from 2020 to 2026 with Nobel Prize winners, panelists of the WEF, researchers at the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute and panelists of the UNESCO chair. The six dominant discourse themes found through a process of analysis across 26 deductive and inductive codes, managed by NVivo 15, the student’s were: the discourse of inevitability, the teacher identity crisis, ethics in-depth arising from the question of governance, the equity paradox, the human exceptionalism, and the corporate authority. The results indicate that these themes support the educational future of AI in three systematic discursive processes: inevitability normalization, institutional authority concentration and equity instrumentalization. The findings recognize that the lack of practitioner educators outlined in each of 20 panels is in itself a form of discursive power, as absence rather than content. The study is intended to demonstrate that talking about AI in education is not only a reflection of educational futures, it is an act to creating them. As educators, policymakers, or communities aim to understand and embrace AI adoption as a democratic process, it is crucial that their discursive mechanisms are made visible. Recommendations are made for policy makers, schools, teacher educators, curriculum planners and researchers.

This quantitative research explores gender variations in perceptions, preferred mobileassisted language learning (MALL)-based techniques, and lexical competence learning of undergraduate ESL students in Pakistan’s province of Punjab using MALL. The set of 140 (70 male, 70 female) undergraduate ESL learners was purposively selected from universities in Punjab. The study used a 40-item, validated Likert-scale questionnaire asking about perceptions of MALL, preferences for MALL-based techniques, and lexical competence development via MALL. The questionnaire had good internal reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha of .968 for males and .943 for females. We analysed gender differences between male and female learners using the Mann-Whitney U test since the data collected through a Likert scale are ordinal. There was no difference in the attitudes of male and female learners to using MALL for vocabulary learning (U = 2578.000, p = .594), which suggests they both deem MALL a useful educational tool. Both males and females expressed positive dispositions toward game-based apps, multimedia, online dictionaries and virtual co-collaborative lives. However, descriptive analysis highlighted differences in the techniques of learning, with females endorsing audiovisual material and wordlist-based learning relatively heavily but males engaging more with independent learning tasks. The reported findings are critically analysed with reference to Social Constructivism, Krashen’s Monitor Model, Connectivism and technology acceptance model (TAM).