International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Research

Authors
Arumugam Raman, Hariharan N Krishnasamy

Abstract
Skype gives students and teachers the opportunity to connect with the outside world without leaving the classroom, and allows them to meet face-to-face with the subjects of their learning or with students from other cultures. Teachers across the world have already arranged many enlightening and unforgettable conferences, demonstrating the extraordinary potential of Skype in the classroom. To examine the level of acceptance of this technology, the UTAUT (Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology) Model is used to infer individual students’ technology acceptance by explaining the variants in Behavior Intention (BI). This study is conducted on 56 secondary school students from Kubang Pasu District. The students are all studying the same subject and they are exposed to the application of SKYPE. A set of questionnaire, in the UTAUT Model which was developed by Venkatesh et al. (2003) [17], is used to collect data which is then descriptively analyzed by using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 20 and SmartPLS 2.0. The findings of the study show that Performance Expectancy (PE) (β=0.4230, p<0.01), Social Influence (SI) (β=0.2460, p<0.01) and Facilitating Conditions (FC) (β=0.1360, p<0.01) have a positive influence towards ‘Behavioral Intention’ (BI). The value R2 = 0.413 suggests that 41.3% of the variance in BI can be explained by the extent of PE, EE, SI dan FC. The findings provide evidence that SKYPE is beneficial and effective for the teaching and learning of English. Thus, teachers and learners could tap its potential to encourage and improve the teaching and learning process.