Abstract
Digital competence is seen as one of the important skills for lifelong learning, and schools have begun to focus on the effect of digitalisation on society so that pupils can use and understand digital tools and media. We have mapped teaching practices among Swedish high school language teachers, focusing on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their use of digital tools. While teachers are quite digitally competent privately, they felt they did not have the time to properly investigate new tools for their teaching. Chinese and Spanish teachers in particular felt that English teachers were at an advantage, with more tools and tutorials being available in English. Digital tools were positive for learning; however, it was important to focus on language learning. Thus, the pandemic has led to a positive change in language teaching, but more time needs to be made available for finding and learning new tools.
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Notes
- 1.
The sign test is the simplest way to analyse data from paired samples (i.e. agree/disagree with a certain statement). The null hypothesis is that the total cases that agree with the statement are equal to that who disagree with it. The Z value is adopted to compare the numbers that agree with and disagree with a statement. It is calculated by using the formula: Z = Pobs – 0.5/square-root of (0.5 × 0.5)/n*, where Pobs = number of answers with the value of either 1 or 2 (i.e. positive attitudes to the statements)/n* and where n* = the total number of answers except value 3 (i.e. neutral attitude to the statements).
- 2.
The Kruskal-Wallis test is a test for between-group analysis and is used to compare the scores on a certain variable for three or more groups. Scores are converted to ranks and the mean rank for each group is compared.
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White, J.R., Yang, T., Muñoz, A.S., Gao, M. (2023). Digital Competence and Teaching Practices of Language Teachers in Sweden in a COVID-19 World. In: Sadeghi, K., Thomas, M. (eds) Second Language Teacher Professional Development. Digital Education and Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12070-1_7
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