Abstract
This study examines how educational technology is discursively constructed in academic writing through a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of English-language abstracts from Turkish and Anglophone educational research published between 2012 and 2025. Building on Hayes’ (2015) critique of instrumentalist “use of technology” framings in policy documents, this research investigates whether such framings exist in academic paper abstracts and explores cross-cultural variations in technological conceptualization therein. Two specialized corpora were compiled: 1,163 Turkish abstracts (270,067 tokens) from DergiPark and 3,863 Anglophone abstracts (720,317 tokens) from ERIC database. Using LancsBox X with USAS semantic tagging, the study analyzed collocational patterns between “use” and “technology” and examined linguistic presentations of technology as monolithic versus specified concepts. Findings reveal that instrumentalist framings significantly exceed general English usage in both corpora, with the Turkish corpus showing stronger instrumentalist tendencies (607.26 vs. 298.48 normalized frequency for “use of technology”). Turkish scholars also demonstrated more pronounced monolithic technology framings, using singular “technology” forms at a 6.65:1 ratio compared to 2.24:1 in Anglophone abstracts. Through Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, these patterns are interpreted as reflecting embedded technical codes that position technology as external tools rather than socially constituted practices. The study contributes to understanding how educational technology paper abstracts reproduces rather than challenges dominant technological framings, with implications for implementation in developing nations influenced by policy borrowing.
Plain Language Summary
When researchers write about technology in education, they often use phrases like “using technology to improve learning” or “the use of technology in classrooms.” This may seem like a harmless habit, but language shapes thinking. Describing technology as something we simply “use”—like a hammer or a pencil—hides the reality that technologies come with built-in assumptions, values, and limitations that shape what takes place in the name of education. We compared over 5,000 research paper summaries from Turkish and English-speaking scholars in educational sciences to see how they talk about technology. We found that both groups rely heavily on this “tool” language, but Turkish researchers do so even more—and they’re also more likely to talk about “technology” as if this word explains a single, general “thing,” rather than diverse tools, systems, platforms or activities. This matters because how researchers write about technology influences how teachers and policymakers think about it. If academic experts treat technology as a neutral tool to be “used,” it becomes harder to ask critical questions about “which technologies,”“designed by whom,”“for what purposes,”“at what cost,” or “for whose benefit.”
Keywords
Introduction
Critical discourse analysis of post-pandemic higher education literature demonstrates that, while technology appeared as a savior of education during the crisis, the emergent discourse became increasingly “mediatory of neoliberal and consumerist ideologies” (Clark, 2024). This opportunistic framing has opened pathways for uncritical investment in pervasive, data-driven technological paradigms. In retrospect, however, it can be said that neoliberal economic ideology has been progressively reshaping educational systems worldwide since the 1980s. There has been numerous markers of this progress, such as increasing marketization of educational services, emphasis on standardized assessment, competition between institutions, and the reconceptualization of students as consumers (Apple, 2013; Ball, 2012).
In addition to these, one of the most significant effects of neoliberal influence has been the progressive narrowing of how technology is conceptualized in educational contexts. While the word technology historically reflected a concept encompassing a broad range of tools, processes, and knowledge systems (Galbraith, 1967), in contemporary educational discourse it mostly refers to digital, computational, and networked devices (Cuban, 2001) or software products that run on these. This narrowing also aligns with what scholars describe as a techno-solutionist (Morozov, 2013) approach to education – the belief that digital innovation can resolve complex educational challenges without addressing their underlying social, economic, and political causes. Far from being merely neutral tools, technology in education has not only narrowed in scope but also became a vehicle for broader ideological shifts in how education is conceptualized (Selwyn, 2013). Through particular rhetorical strategies, technology in education is constructed as inevitable, necessary, and transformative, creating a technological imperative (Selwyn, 2016). This imperative pressures educational institutions to adopt new digital products regardless of pedagogical need. An example for this rhetorical framing has recently been discussed in a critical discourse analysis of Google for Education and Microsoft Education websites, where technology is positioned as a transformative agent to revitalize education, constructing teachers and students as incomplete beings awaiting corporate salvation (Marone & Heinsfeld, 2023). This pattern of corporate influence extends beyond individual company websites to shape broader educational discourse through what Heinsfeld and Marone (2023) identify as the corporate role in educational landscape reports. Their analysis demonstrates how “technology corporations can play a crucial role in shaping educational technology discourses in landscape reports, including how technology should be adopted and the very future of higher education.” Such examples reveal how global corporate actors shape educational imaginaries, embedding techno-solutionist logics into educational discourse worldwide and subtly redefining educational challenges as technical problems requiring market-driven solutions.
The Turkish educational system provides a particularly illustrative case of these trends. Since the 1980s, Turkey has undergone significant transformation through neoliberal policies, with particularly intense reforms occurring in the early 2000s (İnal, 2012). As the global neoliberal wave reshaped economies worldwide, Turkey experienced this transformation through phases that gradually reoriented its educational priorities, structures, and technological implementations. As international economic or financial institutions (e.g., OECD) frequently do in developing nations (Bouhali, 2015), the World Bank began systematically influencing Turkish educational policy through loan-based initiatives starting from late 1990s (Guven, 2008), with interventions seemingly aimed at improving educational quality but primarily serving “the aim of growing the knowledge economy and of increased economic growth through demanding higher skills in the workforce” (Öztürk & Aslan, 2015, p. 96).
These patterns also reflect what Turkish scholars Kulakoglu and Kondakci (2023) identify as policy borrowing– the adoption of educational frameworks from other contexts without sufficient consideration of local needs. Similar dynamics have been documented in other developing nations (Toyama, 2011), where technology projects often overlook the nuanced realities of classrooms, teacher expertise, and local pedagogical traditions. Such transnational circulation of techno-solutionist educational reforms reinforces a global narrative in which technology is assumed to be the default remedy for complex educational problems.
In the midst of these material and policy shifts, discursive patterns have also begun to emerge that shape how technology is conceptualized by educators: practitioners, policymakers and scholars alike. For example, a corpus-based analysis by Hayes (2015) uncovers how, ten years ago, policy documents in the UK repetitively framed technology as an external tool to be used in service of predefined goals. This discursive pattern has been reported to be reinforcing instrumentalist and transactional conceptions of education. A more recent policy discourse analysis confirms the persistence of these instrumentalist patterns across different contexts. Žmavc and Bezlaj’s (2026) corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of European Union policy documents on educational technology from 2015 to 2022 reveals that “despite increasing critical scrutiny, the policy discourse in this period remains predominantly unidimensional, framing EdTech as a transformative solution.” Their study demonstrates how EU policy constructs normative images of “excellent” teachers “inexorably linked to digital competencies” while “implicitly denying teachers’ autonomy in technology adoption,” thus reinforcing institutional power dynamics through linguistic choices similar to those Hayes identified in UK contexts nearly a decade earlier.
However, although a decade has passed since Hayes’ influential study, there has been very limited exploration of whether these same linguistic patterns also appear in the ostensibly critical and reflective domain of academic scholarship. Shanks’ (2020) discourse analysis of 23 years of higher education publications in The Chronicle of Higher Education found that “digital technology was portrayed as an overwhelmingly positive addition to higher education pedagogy” with less than half of analyzed articles containing any critical reflection or contemplative attributes regarding technology integration. This pattern suggests that instrumentalist framings should also be explored more thoroughly and systematically within academic discourse. This research will scrutinize the issue of non-contemplative discourse around education and technology and therefore aim to assess the extent to which discourse in educational research, analyzed over research paper abstracts, reflects Hayes’ instrumentalist framings or other critically relevant perspectives. The goal is to particularly examine comparatively the case of Turkey as a model for a developing nation under influence of neoliberal policies.
In addition to Hayes’ (2015) well-documented use of technology framing, another critical angle in this study is the monolithic technology framing (Mihci, 2025), whereby technology is conceptualized through linguistic patterns as a singular, unqualified, almost mystical force, rather than a diverse set of context-dependent tools, processes, or know-how. As observed by the author, such tendencies are especially pronounced in Turkish academic discourse, where technology is frequently used in the singular form without qualifiers, reinforcing an abstract, reified conception detached from specific pedagogical contexts. This framing resonates with Feenberg’s (2008) notion of technical code, through which social priorities and power structures become embedded in technological choices, further depoliticizing the inherently political nature of education. Understanding these linguistic framings is crucial to revealing how techno-solutionist or determinist logics become naturalized within academic discourse and how they might be contested. Additionally, by exposing these patterns, scholars and practitioners can begin to envision alternative narratives that reclaim educational technology as a site of democratic engagement rather than market-driven inevitability.
Building on these critical perspectives, this study examines how the aforementioned discursive tendencies manifest in research abstracts. By systematically analyzing linguistic patterns in corpora of Turkish and Anglophone educational research abstracts through discourse analysis, the interplay between academic discourse, technology, and education within the context of techno-solutionist narratives is investigated.
Methodology
To achieve its goals, the study employs a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach (Baker, 2006; Partington et al., 2013) to examine how technology is discursively constructed within abstract sections of journal papers in educational research conducted between the years 2012 and 2025. Drawing on Feenberg’s critical theory of technology as the primary theoretical framework, quantitative corpus linguistics methods and qualitative interpretation to uncover potential differences in how Turkish and Anglophone scholars frame technology in educational contexts have been combined. This methodological integration aligns with current developments in corpus linguistics research. Curry and McEnery’s (2025) research agenda for corpus linguistics in language teaching emphasizes the importance of moving beyond purely technical applications toward “contextually and culturally situated approaches” that consider both technological affordances and pedagogical implications. Their framework supports the present study’s approach of using corpus methods not as ends in themselves, but as tools for revealing culturally specific patterns, in our case on how different academic communities construct the concept of technology within educational contexts. Recent systematic reviews further validate this methodological approach. Yang and Adnan’s (2025) comprehensive analysis of corpus technology integration in English language education from 2020-2024 demonstrates that corpus-based approaches have proven “effective strategy following innovative pedagogical practices” when combined with critical analytical frameworks. Their review confirms that corpus linguistics methods are particularly valuable when applied to educational discourse analysis, supporting the present study’s integration of quantitative corpus analysis with qualitative critical interpretation. So, while corpus linguistics tools are used to identify statistically significant patterns in language use, these patterns are treated as entry points for deeper critical analysis rather than ends in themselves. The quantitative findings guide the selection of specific textual instances for closer qualitative examination, allowing for detailed analysis of how certain conceptualizations of technology manifest in actual academic discourse. This integration of methods enables both systematic coverage of large text volumes and nuanced interpretation of specific discursive constructions, making it particularly suitable for examining how different academic communities may construct varying conceptualizations of technology within the context of education.
Research Questions
Research Question 1: How do collocational patterns between “use” and “technology” differ in frequency across Turkish educational research abstracts, Anglophone educational research abstracts, and general English usage (BNC2014)?
Rationale: Hayes (2015) demonstrates how policy discourse around educational technology frequently employs use as a collocate verb, reflecting and reinforcing an instrumentalist view where technology is positioned as an external tool separate from human agency and social context. This question examines if this instrumentalist framing extends into academic discourse and whether it manifests differently across academic communities. The comparison with the English language corpus BNC2014 provides a baseline for how this linguistic pattern appears in general English usage, while the Turkish-Anglophone comparison investigates potential cultural variations in this discursive construction. The British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014) was selected as the reference corpus due to its comprehensive coverage of general English usage, its public availability, and its compatibility with the LancsBox X software and USAS semantic tagging system. While other corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) or News on the Web (NOW) were considered, BNC2014 was deemed the most suitable for this study due to (a) its size, (b) its absence of licensing restrictions, and (c) its compatibility with analysis tools (LancsBox X).
Research Question 2: How can these collocational patterns in Turkish and Anglophone educational research abstracts be interpreted through the lens of Feenberg’s critical theory of technology?
Rationale: Feenberg’s critical theory of technology provides a particularly suitable framework for interpreting these collocational patterns as it encompasses multiple ways technology is conceptualized in modern discourse. While instrumentalist framings may dominate, examining how “use” collocates with “technology” can reveal broader patterns including substantivist stances, instances of reification or technical code Feenberg identifies in his critical theory. By analyzing these collocational patterns through Feenberg’s theoretical lens, how different academic communities may reproduce or resist various forms of technological consciousness may be uncovered.
Research Question 3: How do Turkish and Anglophone educational research abstracts differ in their linguistic presentation of technology, particularly regarding:
a) The use of unqualified versus specified forms of “technology”
b) The framing of technology as a generalized concept versus distinct contextual tools
Rationale: This question emerges from the researcher’s position as a Turkish scholar who has observed a tendency in academic discourse among Turkish scholars, both in Turkish and English languages, of discussing technology in broad, singular terms, potentially framing it as a generalized, all-purpose, and monolithic concept, as shown by Mihci (2025), rather than a diverse set of context-dependent tools. While the reduction of technology to mean specifically digital tools or information technology products is increasingly common in both Turkish and English general usage (as in tech company for referring to IT companies, or in the Turkish term teknoloji marketi [technology store] for referring to retail stores selling IT products or electronics hardware), the hypothesis is that Turkish educational discourse may be exhibiting a more pronounced pattern of using the word technology in this particular manner. Although the main element of this hypothesis concerns the instrumental framing of technology as a generalized, all-purpose tool, this pattern might also be linked to deterministic, Feenbergian substantivist (Ankiewicz, 2019) views – that is, the belief that technology constitutes an autonomous force shaping society according to its own internal logic. Such framing also connects to reification, the treatment of technology as a fixed, abstract entity, or what Hayes (2015) calls desubjectivisation, the removal of human agency from technology discourse.
Corpus Design and Compilation
To address these research questions, two specialized corpora were compiled: one consisting of English-language abstracts from Turkish scholars and another from Anglophone scholars. English-language abstracts were chosen for both corpora to ensure direct comparability of discursive patterns without the confounding effects of comparing different language systems. The Turkish corpus was compiled through Dergipark, a prominent academic journal hosting service maintained by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). The search criteria included abstracts containing the word “technology” from journals with “education” in their titles, published between 2012 and 2025. This yielded 1,163 abstracts, totaling 270,067 tokens.
The Anglophone corpus was compiled using the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database. The search parameters were configured to retrieve journal articles containing the word “technology” in their abstracts, published between 2012 and 2025, from the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia. This process resulted in 3,863 abstracts with 720,317 tokens. Additional information on the generated corpora have been given in Table 1.
Key Characteristics of the Corpora Compiled for the Study.
MATTR50 = Moving Average Type/Token Ration with 50-word Segments, MTLD = Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity.
For the preparation of text files used in corpus compilation, Python scripts utilizing the BeautifulSoup and Pandas libraries were developed – BeautifulSoup for data extraction and Pandas for data cleaning, addressing issues such as line break inconsistencies caused by OCR scanning in some cases. To ensure ethical compliance in web scraping, the robots.txt files of both DergiPark (which provides publicly accessible XML files for metadata access) and ERIC were reviewed, and no restrictions against automated data retrieval were found in either case.
Both corpora were processed using LancsBox X software, with part-of-speech tagging performed using the spaCy library’s en_core_web_lg pipeline. Additionally, USAS semantic tagging was applied using the UCREL PyMUSAS en_dual_none_contextual model to enable semantic analysis.
Analysis Procedures
To investigate the research questions, a series of corpus queries were designed to capture specific linguistic patterns that might indicate instrumentalist framing and reification of technology.
For Research Question 1, examining instrumentalist framing through the collocate verb “use,” three complementary queries employing USAS tags were designed to capture different syntactic arrangements:
These queries were run against both corpora and the BNC2014 reference corpus to enable comparison of relative frequencies. Log likelihood tests were employed to determine statistical significance of any observed differences.
For Research Question 3, investigating the reification of technology through linguistic patterns, three primary sets of queries were developed:
to investigate the relative frequencies of singular versus plural usage in instances without a preceding identifier, in each corpus.
Statistical significance for all comparisons was assessed using log likelihood tests, taking into account the relative sizes of the corpora. Results from these queries were then subjected to qualitative analysis to interpret the broader implications of any identified patterns for how technology is conceptualized in educational discourse.
Following quantitative analysis, concordance lines for each query were examined qualitatively to identify recurrent discursive patterns. For each research question, all KWIC (keyword in context) outputs were reviewed, and representative examples were selected based on two criteria: (1) typicality, reflecting patterns that appeared frequently across the corpus, and (2) analytical salience, illustrating constructions relevant to the critical theories in question. Examples presented in the findings section were chosen to demonstrate the range of identified patterns rather than to privilege exceptional cases. No formal coding scheme was applied; rather, the qualitative analysis followed an iterative process of pattern identification informed by the theoretical framework outlined above.
Throughout the studies on these corpora, the focus on the lemma “technology” rather than more specific terms (e.g., “digital tools,”“platforms,”“EdTech”) has been theoretically motivated. Following critiques of the “T-word phenomenon” (Mihci, 2025), wherein the monolithic, unqualified use of “technology” serves to naturalize instrumentalist and substantivist ideologies, the present study deliberately examines how scholars frame this abstract, superordinate concept. More specified vocabulary would indicate scholars engaging with particular technologies – arguably a more critically aware practice – whereas the monolithic “technology” is where dominant ideological framings operate most invisibly.
Validity Considerations
The corpus queries underwent iterative refinement to ensure they accurately captured the intended linguistic patterns, particularly for Research Question 3, where specific syntactic constructions needed to be identified. Sample outputs were manually checked at each iteration to verify query accuracy. Examples of matches for each query pattern are provided in the findings section to demonstrate the validity of the query design and support the interpretations drawn from them.
While the corpora differ in size (Turkish: 270,067 tokens; Anglophone: 720,317 tokens), log likelihood tests were employed to ensure valid statistical comparisons. The BNC2014 reference corpus, though slightly older than the timeframe for the custom corpora, provides a reliable baseline for general English usage patterns.
To the author’s knowledge, all journals hosted on Dergipark require English-language abstracts for submissions, regardless of the language used in the main text. This requirement ensures that the Turkish corpus is directly comparable to the Anglophone corpus, as both consist of English-language abstracts.
Findings
Research Question 1: Instrumentalist Framing Through Use
To investigate the instrumentalist framing of technology through the collocate verb use and similar verbs that convey the meaning of usage or utilization, three complementary queries were run against the Turkish corpus (270,067 tokens), the Anglophone corpus (720,317 tokens), and the BNC2014 reference corpus (102,305,246 tokens). The USAS semantic tag A1.5.1, which captures verbs related to “using” and “utilizing,” was combined with the headword “technology” to identify instances such as “use technology,”“utilize technologies,” and “employ technological tools.”Table 2 presents frequencies for each query pattern across the three corpora, both in raw figures and normalized frequencies per million words, taking into account corpus token size.
Raw and Normalized Frequencies of Use Collocations Across Corpora.
Raw Frequencies.
Normalized Frequencies (per million words).
Log-likelihood tests were performed to determine the statistical significance of differences between corpora and the results have been presented in Table 3.
Log-Likelihood Values for Pairwise Comparisons of Corpora.
Reported value is statistically significant at p < .05.
Comparing the Turkish corpus with BNC2014 yielded highly significant differences for all three patterns (LL = 869.21, 1690.83, and 1113.36 respectively, p < .05). Similarly, the Anglophone corpus also showed highly significant differences compared to BNC2014 (LL = 1295.95, 1849.47, and 1568.15 respectively, p < .05). The magnitude of these differences is striking: for instance, the “use of technology” pattern occurs at 607.26 instances per million words in the Turkish corpus and 298.48 in the Anglophone corpus, compared to just 0.58 in BNC2014–representing differences of over 1,000-fold and 500-fold, respectively. These results indicate that instrumentalist framing in educational sciences academic discourse dramatically exceeds general English usage across both academic corpora.
The comparison between Turkish and Anglophone corpora also revealed significant differences across all patterns (LL = 11.31, 44.60, and 16.01 respectively, p < .05), with the Turkish corpus showing consistently higher normalized frequencies of use collocations. Across all three query patterns, the Turkish corpus exhibited frequencies approximately 1.5 to 2 times higher than the Anglophone corpus (e.g., 607.26 vs. 298.48 for “use of technology”). This suggests a more pronounced tendency toward instrumentalist framing of technology in Turkish academic discourse compared to Anglophone academic writing. The following examples from the Turkish corpus illustrate this prevalent framing:
…teacher candidate gradually
…results obtained from research findings it was determined that teachers use technology and teaching applications during their individual teaching processes…
Similar patterns are also found in the Anglophone corpus:
…students are expected to
…. Ever wondered how to
Particularly notable is the high frequency of the
Moreover, qualitative analysis of the KWIC outputs for the BNC2014 reference corpus reveals an interesting pattern: Despite the significantly lower normalized frequencies of all queries in BNC2014 compared to both academic corpora, the examples found in BNC2014 often still seem to occur within educational contexts:
…Nason (2014) found that the development of ’adaptive expertise’ in
…in cases of technology experience and their attitude towards learning
In order to take a closer look at this phenomenon, subgenre distributions in BNC2014 have been analyzed and it was observed that an intriguing pattern in the “use”-“technology” collocations manifests. Although these constructions appear significantly less frequently in BNC2014, when they do appear, they are concentrated in written discourse on education. For instance, the pattern
In direct answer to Research Question 1: “Use”-“technology” collocations occur at dramatically higher frequencies in both academic corpora compared to general English usage (over 1,000-fold in the Turkish corpus, over 500-fold in the Anglophone corpus), with Turkish scholars showing approximately 1.5 to 2 times higher frequencies than their Anglophone counterparts across all query patterns.
Research Question 2: Instrumentalist Framing Through “Use”
Having established the prevalence of instrumentalist framing through “use”-“technology” collocations in both corpora, this section deepens the analysis by examining specific linguistic patterns within these collocations and interpreting them through Feenberg’s critical theory of technology. Rather than simply identifying instances where technology is used, this analysis focuses on how these collocational patterns reveal underlying conceptualizations of using technology within educational discourse. Through close examination of concordance lines from both corpora, several distinct patterns have emerged that illuminate different aspects of Feenberg’s theoretical framework.
Group 1: Technology as Neutral Instrument for Educational Goals
A particularly prominent pattern observed across both corpora involves the formula “use technology to [achieve educational outcome],” as illustrated in these examples from the Turkish and Anglophone corpora:
… used technology
… use technology
… use technology
… use technology
… use technology
… use technology
Similarly, adverbial modifications appear in patterns such as:
… use technology
… use technology
These linguistic constructions exemplify what Feenberg identifies as an instrumentalist view of technology, where technology is framed as a neutral tool that exists separate from social contexts and can be controlled and directed toward predetermined ends. As Feenberg (2008, p. 37) explains, this position holds that “technology favors specific ends and obstructs others” but remains essentially neutral in itself. The consistent syntactic pattern positions the notion of technology as a means rather than an end in itself – a tool through which educators can achieve externally defined educational goals.
This framing is significant because it assumes technologies have no inherent values or politics of their own; or that technology as a monolithic all-purpose tool can supposedly be used for different purposes without changing its fundamental nature, and its effects depend entirely on how humans choose to deploy it. The adverbial modifications further reinforce this instrumentalist view by suggesting that the value of technology is determined solely by how it is used rather than any inherent qualities it might possess. By positioning technology as something that merely needs to be used correctly to achieve desired outcomes, these examples sidestep questions about how educational technologies might already embody certain values, regardless of how they’re implemented. Feenberg (2008, p. 32) notes that technology is “realized through designs that narrow the range of interests and concerns that can be represented by the normal functioning of the technology and the institutions that depend on it.” This linguistic pattern effectively positions educators as mere users rather than critical participants in shaping what educational technology is and does, reinforcing a division between those who design technologies and those who merely implement them.
Group 2: Nominalization of “Technology Use” in Educational Contexts
A second distinct pattern emerged across both corpora through the nominalized phrase “use of technology” followed by context-specific prepositions like “in” or “for”:
…
…
…
…
…
This linguistic construction represents a subtle variation of the instrumentalist view through what Fairclough (2003) terms nominalization– transforming processes (a particular subject using technology) into nominal entities (use of technology). This grammatical transformation removes agency, obscuring who is using the technology and how. According to Machin and Mayr (2012), through removal of agents and patients in clauses, nominalization can obscure power relations and responsibility, as well. In this case, it may also be argued that the nominalized structure creates what Thompson (2013, p. 246) calls thingification, and processes thus become entities to be studied rather than actions performed by educational actors. Feenberg (2017, p. 120) explains that, for the scientific-technical rationality that shapes this sort of discourse, “nature and the social world are quantifiable entities and the human subject is confronted with a world that cannot be fundamentally changed, only technically manipulated.” The nominalization therefore separates technology from social processes and human agency, reifying it as something that exists outside of and prior to educational practice.
While these examples acknowledge context-specificity through prepositional phrases (e.g., in, for), they also maintain technology’s position as an external tool being imported into educational settings rather than as something constituted within educational practice itself. This pattern reinforces what Hayes (2015) identifies as externality where technology is positioned as separate from people. Though more contextually nuanced than Group 1, these examples still reflect the instrumentalist assumption that technologies exist independently of the social contexts in which they are found.
Group 3: “Technology Use” as Measurable Competency
A third prominent pattern emerged in both corpora with “technology use” functioning as a compound nominal that becomes the object of measurement, assessment, or classification:
… technology use
… technology use
… technology use
… technology use
…
…
…
This linguistic construction transforms “technology use” from an action into a measurable attribute or competency – something that can be quantified, evaluated, and compared across individuals or contexts, which indicates a subtle shift in previous instrumentalist framings. While technology remains a tool, the focus shifts to measuring competency in using that tool, reinforcing what Feenberg (2017, p. 119) identifies as scientific-technical rationality. This quantification of technology use mirrors the broader patterns of reification that Feenberg, drawing on Lukács, associates with capitalist practices. Ultimately, these transform educational concerns into technical matters while reducing complex pedagogical processes to questions of efficiency and effectiveness. The recurring emphasis on levels, competence, and efficacy transforms “technology use” into a standardized skill set that can be measured against predetermined benchmarks. Such linguistic constructions align with what is identified as neoliberal governance in education (Bouhali, 2015), where performance measurement and quantifiable outcomes become central to educational practice. By reframing technology use as a measurable competency rather than a situated social practice, these examples reinforce what Feenberg (2008, p. 34) critiques as the separation of technology from its social context – a separation that “obscures the social nature of every technical act.” It then becomes harder to realize that technological practices are embedded within and shaped by broader social relations and power structures.
Group 4: Technology Use as Academic Subject
A fourth distinct pattern emerging in both corpora reveals the transformation of “technology use” into a self-referential object of academic inquiry:
a qualitative investigation into why university lecturers stop using technology
a theoretical framework to explore teachers’ technology use in classroom settings
the use of technology has become one of the most studied subjects by researchers
purpose of this study is to analyze status of information technology use by science teachers for physics subjects
to determine the opinions of secondary school students regarding the use of technology in high school science education
This pattern differs fundamentally from the previous three in that “technology use” is no longer framed as an instrumental action (Group 1), a contextualized practice (Group 2), or a measurable competency (Group 3). Rather, it is framed directly as an object of academic research itself. Technology use, here, has been transformed into a discursive formation – a self-contained field of study that generates its own meta-discourse and recursive loops of knowledge production.
This framing highlights what Feenberg (2008) identifies as operational autonomy, (p. 36) wherein institutional power structures “reproduce the conditions of their own supremacy at each iteration of the technologies they command” (Feenberg, 2008, p. 37). The educational sciences academia, as an institution with its own operational autonomy, incorporates “technology use” as a legitimate object of study, thus creating a self-perpetuating field of inquiry. What makes this pattern particularly notable is how it simultaneously acknowledges technology as a topic worthy of critical investigation while potentially neutralizing that critique by containing it within academic discourse. The self-referentiality evident in phrases found in abstract texts during this study, such as “… a theoretical framework to explore teachers’ technology use in classroom settings…” represents a form of academic recursion that reinforces existing power structures. The academic study of “technology use” creates a situation where the means of producing knowledge about educational practice becomes its own end. The subject-object relationship is doubled: researchers (subjects) study teachers (objects), who are themselves subjects in relation to technology (objects).
This meta-discursive framing has implications for how educational technology is conceptualized and implemented. As Hamilton and Feenberg (2005) explain in their analysis of online education, for instance, when technology becomes the subject of academic study, a tension emerges between technocratic and democratic approaches to technology design and implementation. The former approach often views technology primarily as a means of commodification and automation, while the latter envisions technology as enhancing human communication and collaboration.
The linguistic pattern identified here also aligns with what are termed as (a) the “Ed-Tech Speak,” where recursive academic discourse reinforces the notion that technology use is an inevitable and natural part of educational practice that requires expert study and monitoring (Selwyn, 2016); and (b) the “Ed-Tech imaginary,” explained as stories invented to explain the necessity of technology or the promises of it (Watters, 2020), circulating within academic discourse and shaping how practitioners approach and implement technology.
The pattern appears with similar frequency in both Turkish and Anglophone corpora, suggesting that the academization of technology use represents a global trend in educational research. This trend is particularly noteworthy in the Turkish context, where, as mentioned in the introduction, educational technology initiatives have been shaped by international institutions like the World Bank. The academic meta-discourse around technology use thus becomes a vehicle for what Kulakoglu and Kondakci (2023) have identified as “policy borrowing.”
In sum, the transformation of “technology use” into an academic subject represents a significant pattern in educational discourse that differs from instrumental, contextual, or competency-based framings. This academization potentially contributes to the reification of technology while simultaneously offering a site for its critique. While this contradiction reflects the dialectical nature of technological development that Feenberg has consistently emphasized in his work, recent scholarship has also called for sophisticated critical frameworks to address these contradictions. In this respect, Castañeda and Williamson (2021) argue for “assembling new toolboxes of methods and theories for innovative critical research on educational technology,” emphasizing the need to move beyond conventional academic approaches that inadvertently reproduce the very assumptions they seek to critique.
In direct answer to Research Question 2: The collocational patterns reveal four distinct manifestations of instrumentalist framing – technology as neutral instrument, nominalized “technology use,” technology use as measurable competency, and technology use as academic subject – all of which position technology as external to educational practice and obscure the social values embedded in technological designs, thereby reinforcing rather than challenging dominant technical codes.
Research Question 3: Instrumentalist Framing Through Use
To investigate the relative prevalence of monolithic versus specified framing of technology in academic discourse, three complementary analyses were conducted: (1) examining the presence of preceding identifiers or qualifiers, (2) comparing singular versus plural usage, and (3) analyzing unqualified technology in prepositional phrases.
For the first analysis, the frequency with which “technology” appeared with preceding identifiers (e.g., “digital technology," “educational technology") was examined using the query pattern
Raw and Normalized Frequencies of Technology with Preceding Identifiers.
Raw frequencies.
Normalized frequencies (per million words).
To determine if this difference was statistically significant, a log-likelihood test was performed, yielding LL = 183.04 (p < .05). With a normalized frequency of 4,334.34 per million words compared to 2,521.65 in the Turkish corpus, Anglophone scholars are approximately 1.7 times more likely to qualify or specify the type of technology being discussed.
The second analysis compared the frequencies of singular (“technology”) versus plural (“technologies”) usage in each corpus, analyzed over queries of
Raw and Normalized Frequencies of Singular Versus Plural Forms.
Raw Frequencies.
Normalized Frequencies (per million words).
To determine if this distribution difference was statistically significant, a chi-square test of independence was performed. The relationship between corpus type and singular/plural form usage was significant, χ2(1, N = 10,038) = 382.47, p < .001. Turkish scholars tended to use the word in singular form with a significantly higher incidence covering 86.9% of instances, compared to 68.9% for Anglophone scholars.
The third analysis examined unqualified technology in common prepositional phrases, using the query patterns
Raw and Normalized Frequencies of Unqualified Technology in Prepositional Phrases.
Raw frequencies.
Normalized frequencies (per million words).
A chi-square test confirmed the statistical significance of this distribution difference, χ2(1, N = 3,345) = 166.80, p < .001. In unqualified instances of using the headword “technology,” Turkish scholars used the singular form in 99.3% of instances, compared to 85.8% for Anglophone scholars.
These findings indicate substantial differences in how Turkish and Anglophone scholars linguistically construct technology in their academic writing in the English language. While both groups show a preference for singular over plural forms, this preference is dramatically more pronounced in Turkish academic discourse, particularly when the word is used without a preceding identifier noun or adjective. This behavior of omitting preceding identifiers is similarly more common with Turkish scholars of education sciences, who are less likely to qualify or specify the type of technology being discussed, suggesting a more generalized conceptualization of technology.
In direct answer to Research Question 3: Turkish scholars demonstrate a significantly stronger preference for monolithic technology framing – using singular forms at a 6.65:1 ratio compared to 2.24:1 for Anglophone scholars, and employing preceding identifiers far less frequently (8.6% vs. 24.0%). This pattern suggests that Turkish academic discourse constructs “technology” as a singular, undifferentiated, externally borrowed concept, while Anglophone discourse shows somewhat greater – though still limited – differentiation.
Discussion
The findings from the corpus-assisted discourse analysis reveal significant patterns in how educational technology is discursively constructed in academic writing, with notable differences between Turkish and Anglophone scholarly communities. This discussion interprets these findings through the lens of critical theories.
The Persistence of Instrumentalist Framing
A decade after Hayes’ (2015) critique of the “use of technology” framing in educational policy documents in the UK, this study confirms that such instrumentalist framing became embedded also in discourse about educational technology, at least in research paper abstracts. The significant prevalence of “use” collocations across both corpora, at frequencies far exceeding those in general English usage displayed in BNC2014, indicates that academic writing has largely internalized rather than challenged the instrumental conceptualization.
Particularly striking is the finding that “use of technology” appears more than twice as frequently in the Turkish corpus compared to the Anglophone corpus when normalized. This suggests that instrumentalist framings may be even more thoroughly naturalized in contexts where educational technology has been primarily introduced through policy borrowing and international influence.
The persistence of instrumentalist framings across both corpora, despite decades of critical scholarship problematizing such framings, suggests what Feenberg (2008) describes as the nature of technical codes – the ways in which social values and priorities become embedded in our discursive practices to the point where they appear natural and inevitable. Komljenovic and Robertson’s (2016) analysis of “market-making” dynamics in higher education reveals how educational institutions actively construct markets through such natural discursive practices (as “socio-technical tools”) that position education as a commodity and technology as a competitive advantage. Their framework helps explain how instrumentalist framings become embedded in academic discourse through broader processes of educational marketization, where technology serves not merely as a pedagogical tool but as a market signifier of institutional modernization and competitiveness. The recurrent pattern of “use technology to [achieve educational outcome]” across both corpora reveals a largely unchallenged assumption that technology exists primarily as a tool, not unlike a Swiss army knife or a Promethean torch. This mystical, universal tool is expected to be applied toward predetermined educational goals, rather than understood as socially shaped practices that transform the very nature of educational practice.
The Monolithic Technology Phenomenon
Perhaps the most striking finding of this study concerns the significant difference in how Turkish and Anglophone scholars linguistically present the concept of technology. The dramatically higher preference for singular over plural forms among Turkish scholars (6.65:1 compared to 2.24:1 in Anglophone writing), combined with their more limited use of preceding identifiers, reveals a tendency to present technology, within the context of education; as a monolithic, undifferentiated, externally borrowed concept. This presentation is in contrast with a conception of technology as diverse, context-specific tools or intricate, pedagogically informed practices that may not just be used but also actively designed by none other than educators themselves.
This “monolithic technology” framing is particularly pronounced in prepositional phrases, where Turkish scholars used the singular form in 99.3% of instances compared to 85.8% for Anglophone scholars – a ratio difference of 150.5:1 versus 6.06:1. This finding empirically confirms the researcher’s initial observation about a broader tendency in Turkish academic discourse to discuss “technology” in a reified manner. Such monolithic framing aligns with what Feenberg identifies as a substantivist view of technology (Ankiewicz, 2019). The prevalence of this framing in Turkish academic discourse may reflect the historical conditions under which educational technology was introduced in the Turkish context, as explained by Öztürk and Aslan (2015).
Crucially, this monolithic framing serves to abstract technology from its social and political contexts, potentially obscuring the ways in which specific technological artifacts embody particular values and power relations. The linguistic tendency to present “technology” as a singular, undifferentiated concept makes these embedded values and politics more difficult to identify and critique.
The combination of stronger instrumentalist framing and more pronounced monolithic technology framing in Turkish academic discourse creates a particularly powerful discursive formation. Here, technology is simultaneously presented as an external tool to be “used” and as a singular, abstract force. This discursive formation effectively doubles the conceptual distance between educational practitioners and the technological systems that increasingly shape their practice. Such polarization of educators in Turkey to instrumentalist or substantivist stances, as demonstrated by Mihci (2025), may be limiting their ability to critically engage with and democratically reshape these systems.
Academic Discourse as Reinforcing Technical Codes
The transformation of “technology use” into an academic subject represents an interesting finding for understanding how discourse in abstracts may potentially reinforce dominant technical codes. This academization creates what might be called an epistemological loop, in which educational technology is studied largely through frameworks that have already internalized instrumentalist assumptions. Decuypere et al.’s (2021) introduction to critical studies of digital education platforms argues that educational technology research must move beyond “technical rationalities” to examine how platforms “reconfigure educational practices, relationships, and subjectivities” through their embedded logics. The framework presented therein supports the present study’s findings by demonstrating how seemingly neutral academic discourse about technology actually participates in constructing the very technological relationships it purports to analyze objectively. This academization of “technology use,” along with its conception as measurable competency, also potentially obscures the tension between technocratic visions that treat technology as an efficiency-enhancing replacement for human labor and democratic alternatives that envision technology as enhancing human communication and participation. As academia focuses on measuring and documenting this “technology use,” it seems to give up on questioning the fundamental assumptions about what educational technology is and does.
Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Educational Technology Discourse
The consistent pattern of differences between Turkish and Anglophone corpora – with Turkish abstract discourse not only showing stronger instrumentalist framing, but also more established substantivist stance reflected by the monolithic framing – raises important questions about the cross-cultural dimensions of educational technology discourse. While these may be interpreted as simple linguistic variations, it may also be claimed that the phenomenon deserves attention and an analysis in relation to the different historical, economic, and political contexts in which educational technology has developed in these settings.
As discussed in the introduction, Turkey’s educational technology landscape has been significantly shaped by neoliberal influences, externally through World Bank loan-based initiatives (Aslan et al., 2012), such as the almost overnight establishment of World Bank loan-funded Computer and Instructional Technologies Education (CITE) undergraduate programs at Turkish state universities (Öztürk & Aslan, 2015). On the other hand, deliberate policymaking by the government (İnal, 2012); such as the large-scale Turkish Ministry of National Education project, FATİH, which ultimately emphasized hardware acquisition over pedagogical concerns (Toprak, 2014), may be listed as the internal influences. All and all, the stronger instrumentalist and monolithic framings in Turkish academic discourse may reflect what Bouhali (2015) identifies as the role of international financial institutions in promoting technocentric approaches to educational development in developing nations. These framings may be further reinforced by what Kulakoglu and Kondakci (2023) describe as patterns of policy borrowing.
The resulting pattern of uncritical technological optimism in Turkish educational contexts is further supported by recent empirical research on Turkish preservice teachers’ conceptualizations of technology. Bardakci and KocadağÜnver’s (2020) metaphor analysis of 55 preservice ICT teachers in Turkey found that “technology is widely being regarded in a utopian and improved state of affairs way of approach,” with utopian viewpoints representing 38.9% of responses compared to only 22.5% dystopian viewpoints. Significantly, their study revealed that participants’ metaphorical expressions focused overwhelmingly on the “effects of technology” (86.2%) rather than its “origins” (13.8%), suggesting a surface-level engagement with technology that parallels the instrumentalist framings identified in the present corpus analysis. The researchers noted that this pattern reflects Turkey’s classification as a collectivistic culture where “science and technology is being treated as magic, and public is uninformed about technological facts,” reinforcing the notion that monolithic framing of technology may be culturally situated phenomena.
In fact, the uncritical engagement pattern has been shown to extend beyond preservice teachers to the broader landscape of Turkish educational technology scholarship. Kara Aydemir and Can’s (2019) systematic analysis of 353 postgraduate theses in educational technology completed at Turkish universities between 1996 and 2016 found that “critical methods were overlooked and social, cultural, and political issues were largely silenced” in the field. Their analysis revealed a marked preference for quantitative and experimental methodologies, with qualitative and critical approaches remaining marginal throughout the two-decade period examined. The authors conclude that Turkish educational technology research has predominantly focused on technical and implementation-oriented questions while neglecting the broader sociopolitical dimensions of technology in education. These findings suggest that the instrumentalist discursive patterns identified in the present corpus analysis reflect established disciplinary norms within Turkish educational technology research rather than artifacts of second-language academic writing.
The more nuanced conceptualization of technology evidenced in Anglophone academic discourse – with greater qualification of technology types, more frequent use of plural forms, and less reliance on monolithic framing – may reflect the longer history of critical engagement with educational technology in these contexts.
The cross-cultural differences identified in this study therefore should not be interpreted as simply positioning one academic community as more “advanced” or “critical” than another, but rather as revealing how global discourses about educational technology are refracted through particular national and cultural contexts, creating variations in emphasis and framing while maintaining certain fundamental assumptions.
Conclusion
Theoretical Implications
This study extends existing critical perspectives on educational technology discourse in four dimensions.
First, whereas Hayes (2015) examined instrumentalist framings in policy documents, the present study demonstrates that these patterns permeate academic writing itself – the very discourse that ostensibly informs and critiques policy. The finding that “use of technology” constructions and nominalized “technology use” framings have become embedded in scholarly abstracts suggests that academic discourse may be reproducing rather than challenging dominant conceptualizations of technology.
Second, by comparing academic corpora against general English usage (BNC2014), we provide preliminary evidence that instrumentalist framings may be concentrated in educational technology scholarship rather than reflecting ordinary language patterns.
Third, the Turkish case offers relevance beyond its immediate context. As a developing country characterized by educational policy borrowing and neoliberal reform agendas, Turkey may exemplify patterns present in similar settings worldwide. The stark differences between Turkish and Anglophone academic writing – particularly in monolithic versus specified technology framing – suggest that Feenberg’s distinction between instrumentalist and substantivist views manifests differently across cultural and economic contexts, with developing nations potentially more susceptible to substantivist framings due to the conditions under which educational technology has been introduced.
Fourth, this corpus study extends Hayes’ focus on “use” collocations by also examining singular/plural distinctions and identified/non-identified technology references. These dimensions reveal how “technology” is discursively constructed as a monolithic, abstract force versus plural, context-specific practices – aligning with recent theorization of the “T-word phenomenon” (Mihci, 2025). Together, these findings provide systematic empirical grounding for Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, demonstrating how technical codes become embedded in academic discourse in ways that may limit the ability to imagine alternative relationships between technology and education.
Practical Implications
The findings of this study have several practical implications for academic writing, educational practice, and policy development. First, they highlight the need for greater reflexivity in academic writing about educational technology. Scholars should critically examine how their linguistic choices may inadvertently reproduce instrumentalist assumptions, and explore alternative ways of conceptualizing and discussing educational technology that emphasize its socially embedded nature.
Second, the identification of significant differences between Turkish and Anglophone abstract discourse suggests the need for more context-sensitive approaches to educational technology development and implementation. Rather than uncritically adopting frameworks and approaches from other contexts, educational technology initiatives should be grounded in local educational traditions and needs, with careful attention to how technology is conceptualized and discussed in different cultural settings.
Third, the persistence of instrumentalist framings across both corpora suggests the need for more critical approaches to educational technology in teacher education and professional development. Helping educators develop more nuanced understandings of technology as socially embedded practice rather than simply as tools to be “used” may enable more thoughtful and democratic engagement with educational technologies.
Finally, the prevalence of monolithic framings of technology, particularly in the Turkish context, highlights the importance of specifying and contextualizing discussions of technology in policy and practice. Moving away from abstract references to “technology” toward more specific discussions of particular technological tools and practices in their social contexts may help to demystify technology and make its embedded values and politics more visible.
Limitations and Future Research
While this study provides valuable insights into how educational technology is discursively constructed in academic writing, it has several limitations that suggest directions for future research.
First of all, some limitations should be noted regarding corpus comparability. While Dergipark primarily hosts Turkish journals and the ERIC database was filtered by selected Anglophone countries, it was considered possible for both sources to include a number of authors from other linguistic backgrounds, such as authorship by non-Turkish nationals hosted in Dergipark journals. Manual checking confirmed these instances were negligible and unlikely to affect the overall analysis of discursive patterns in Turkish and Anglophone academic communities. However, the comparison between DergiPark and ERIC corpora also warrants methodological acknowledgment. While both platforms host peer-reviewed educational research, they differ in scope and composition. These structural differences may introduce variation beyond the cultural-linguistic factors under investigation.
Another important issue is the focus on abstracts, which, while enabling direct comparison between corpora, may not fully capture how technology is conceptualized in overall academic discourse. Abstracts, on the one hand, are an important area to scrutinize and search for linguistic patterns because, they usually have word limits and authors need to be very careful with their linguistic choices. However, it is also due to this brief nature that the discourse analysis in this study falls short of analyzing more liberal, uninhibited uses of language that allow for deeper meaning making. Future research might explore whether similar patterns exist in corpora compiled out of full texts and not only abstracts. In particular, full-text analysis could reveal discursive patterns that abstracts structurally cannot contain. For example, introduction and discussion sections typically include justificatory rhetoric – arguments for why the research matters and what its findings imply – that abstracts omit due to space constraints. In these sections, technological determinism may operate not at the level of how technology is described, but at the level of how research itself is legitimized. The technological imperative (Selwyn, 2016) may manifest in introductory moves that frame studies as necessary (i.e., “because, technology…”) and in concluding moves that frame implications (i.e., “therefore, technology…”). Such justificatory framings would extend the present analysis beyond instrumentalist description toward the rhetorical construction of technological inevitability – a dimension of educational technology discourse that abstracts, by their nature, cannot capture.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the English language output of Turkish scholars represent what might technically be referred to as L2 output, as the mother language of Turkish scholars is not English but Turkish. Therefore, a corpus linguistic analysis of Turkish language publications in educational sciences could shed more light into how Turkish scholars shape their conceptualizations of technology.
Additionally, the use of BNC2014 as a reference corpus introduces a temporal mismatch, as its data predates the 2012–2025 timeframe of the Turkish and Anglophone corpora. While BNC2014 was selected for its comprehensive coverage, tool compatibility, and accessibility, a more contemporary reference corpus would have strengthened the comparative analysis. Researchers should interpret the BNC2014 comparisons as indicative of general English usage patterns rather than as temporally aligned benchmarks.
Moreover, the corpus-based approach, while enabling systematic analysis of large text volumes, necessarily sacrifices some of the contextual richness that more qualitative approaches might provide. Future research might complement this approach with in-depth analysis of interviews with scholars to explore how they understand and conceptualize technology, as well as educational technology.
Lastly, the scope may be expanded by not only focusing on academic writing but instead trying to understand how, in Turkey or in any other developing nation, technology is discursively constructed in other genres and contexts, such as classroom practice, policy documents, or popular media. Future research might explore how academic discourse in their local settings relates to and influences these other domains, and how different stakeholders in education conceptualize and discuss technology.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The Claude.ai generative AI tool was used for providing linguistic suggestions.
Ethical Considerations
This study involved the analysis of publicly available academic abstracts and did not require formal ethical approval as no human participants were directly involved. The corpus compilation process followed ethical web scraping practices, with robots.txt files of both DergiPark and ERIC databases reviewed to ensure compliance with their data access policies. No restrictions against automated data retrieval were identified. All analyzed abstracts were already published in the public domain through academic journals and databases. The study maintained anonymity by focusing on linguistic patterns rather than identifying individual authors or institutions. Data collection and analysis procedures adhered to accepted standards for corpus linguistics research involving publicly accessible academic texts.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The corpus data files generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Data sharing will be considered on a case-by-case basis due to participant privacy considerations.