Prospective Foreign Language Teachers' Opinions on Internet Addiction by Gender: A Study on Erbil Iraq

This research was carried out specially to reveal the opinions of prospective foreign language teachers about internet addiction from a demographic point of view. The study group consisted of 140 foreign language teacher candidates studying at ELT department of Tishk International University Faculty of Education. As a data collection tool, a semi-structured interview form was created by the researchers to reveal the opinions of prospective teachers about internet addiction. The data were recorded by the researcher in voice and in writing. The content analysis method that is implemented to analyze qualitative research was used in the analysis of the obtained data (Krippendorff, 2018). According to the results of the research, it is seen that most of the foreign language teacher candidates use the internet for entertainment and education purposes. In addition to this, those who stay connected to the internet for more than 9 to 14 hours a week by using various entertainment applications and different digital communication platforms, and individuals trying to get all their jobs done on the internet, should be called internet addicts. In addition, according to the other results, it was concluded that male foreign language teacher candidates had more information about internet addiction than female foreign language teacher candidates. As a matter of fact, it was found out that male teacher candidates are more internet addicted than female teacher candidate