Digital Technology in English Education: Linguistic Gain and Pain Points

Abstract

Digital technology has recently become increasingly essential in all aspects of life, including education. The outbreak of COVID-19, which has now been declared a pandemic, has intensified and amplified the use of digital technology. However, the impacts of digital technology integrated learning have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The objectives of this study are twofold: to assess the impacts of incorporating digital technology into English education with regard to Thai university students’ linguistic gain and to identify pain points in online learning. Initially, a pretest was developed and administered to first year university students majoring in humanities. Subsequently, the participants were exposed to ten sets of strategically selected grammatical online lessons representing ten grammatical points for 19 days, during which time they were free to explore and exploit the lessons. Then, toward the end of the exposure, a parallel posttest was administered, followed by a post online lesson exposure questionnaire and a semi-structured interview with randomly selected students. The data analysis revealed that, while the participants' linguistic abilities improved significantly, they appeared to have poor learning management. Therefore, although digital technology is valuable and beneficial, some learners need to be scaffolded before embarking on the digital technology integrated English education journey.