The Summary Journal 15

Measuring Digital Competence and ICT Literacy: An Exploratory Study of In-Service English Language Teachers in the Context of Saudi Arabia

Source: International Educational Study; Vol. 10, No. 12; 2017

By Ahmed Abdulteeef M. Al Khateeb

College of Arts, King Faisal University, Al-Ahssa, Eastern Province, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

There has been growing interest among researchers across the globe in the areas of digital competence and information and communication technology (ICT). The concept of information communication and technology (ICT) intersects with the fundamental premises of digital competence. Nevertheless, the latter requires individuals to be able to retrieve, evaluate, store, present and exchange information and communication, as well as collaborate through the internet and social networking tools. Digital competence does not only show the ability to make use of the wealth of new potentials associated with digital technologies and overcome the challenges they may involve, but it also indicates the meaningful participation in the emerging knowledge society of the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this research is to measure in-service English language teachers’ digital competence, particularly for the enhancement of teaching English as a second/foreign language in schools in Saudi Arabia. The research methodology includes the criteria by which researchers go about their work in order to describe, explain and predict certain phenomena. It uses the quantitative approach of methodology. The total number of teachers who participated in this research was one hundred and ten (male and female) teachers across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The participants were in-service English language teachers who work in primary, intermediate and secondary education. They were selected through a technique known as of purposive sampling. A standardized questionnaire was adopted and was later administered and managed via one of the electronic survey platforms, SurveyMonkey. The questionnaire was designed and tested by European Union (Europass) and a few necessary amendments were made in order to make it more suitable for the context and participants.

The findings show that despite the fact that the majority of the teachers had certificates in ICT; they assessed themselves as less competent in several aspects of digital competence. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that other teachers with more or less years of teaching experience are uniquely different. The statistical analysis showed a strong correlation (with a score of 0.73) between the ability to edit the content produced by others such as adding and deleting and the ability to increase awareness of the users’ privet  information and credentials e.g., username and password.

The Summary Journal 14

Motivational Elements of Digital Instructional Games: A Study of Young L2 Learners’ Game Designs

Language Teaching Research 1–16, 2016

By Yuko Goto Butler

University of Pennsylvania, USA

Despite the fact that the number of young second language (L2) learners (up to 12 years old) is growing worldwide, previous studies on task-based language instruction have not given these learners much attention, and it is often reported that young L2 learners tend to lose their motivation for language learning by sometime around the end of primary school (e.g. Carreira, 2006; Lopriore & Mihaljević Djigunović, 2011). This might be partially due to that fact that existing instructional material and tasks designed for young learners ‘often fail to cater to the genuine interests of children and to invoke intrinsic motivation for learning’ (Prosic-Santovac, 2016, p. 1). As young learners engage in playing computer games intensively (Gee, 2007; Prensky, 2001), however, these games are promising sources of information on their interests and factors that intrinsically motivate them.

The aim of the study is to identify motivational task elements based on what children respond to positively in games and incorporate into their own L2 vocabulary learning game designs. Eighty-two sixth-grade students (ages 11–12 years) in Japan were first asked to identify game elements by examining existing games and then to design games incorporating DIG tasks of their own and peer-evaluate them. Building on previous work (Butler, 2015), the study uses a mixed-methods approach to examine how both task-intrinsic characteristics and implementation conditions were realized in innovative and engaging DIG tasks by children.

The results of the study suggest that learners’ affective engagement in tasks may depend on both task implementation conditions as well as task-intrinsic characteristics. Some of the elements identified related to task implementation conditions (e.g. self-control functions, instant feedback, repetition) while others (e.g. challenge, fantasy) related to task-intrinsic characteristics. Skehan (2016) makes a clear distinction between task characteristics (e.g. number of elements in tasks) and task conditions (e.g. planning and repetition) and argues that the later may have a more promising relationship to learning on tasks. The present study suggests that it may be worth investigating if the same argument can be made when it comes to the effect of these factors on learners’ task motivation.