Technology integration practices of secondary English teachers in the Philippines: A study towards framework development

Date of Publication

9-2021

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English Language Education

Subject Categories

Secondary Education

College

Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education

Department/Unit

Dept of English and Applied Linguistics

Thesis Advisor

Leah E. Gustilo

Defense Panel Chair

Sterling M. Plata

Defense Panel Member

Minie Rose C. Lapinid
Maria B. Cequeña

Abstract/Summary

For decades now, technology has been acknowledged ubiquitous in the field of education. The Philippines, for example, has its record of first receiving the affordances of digital technology in education back in 1996 (Vergel de Dios, 2016), and has since then integrated its wide usage in the classroom. In fact, the K to 12 curriculum implemented today advocates strongly for technology to be integrated in all subject areas. Ironically, despite the ubiquity of technology in education, most teachers find themselves unequipped to successfully teach with technology. A 2020 EdTech Ecosystem Report in the Philippines, produced by RTI International (2020), attributes this problem to the lack of technology integration framework guiding teacher standards in the Philippines. In this connection, Sasing (2020) stressed the need to update the existing set of teacher standards in the Philippines, the Philippine Professional Standards for Teachers (henceforth, PPST), specifically by adopting the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (henceforth, TPACK) framework.

First introduced by Koehler and Mishra in 2005, the TPACK framework illustrates the interrelated knowledge base of teachers that allow them to successfully teach with technology. Within this framework, the merging of teachers’ “Total PACKage” (TPACK), or technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge, is recognized to lead to meaningful teaching with technology. Similar to the PPST framework, the review of literature done in the present study concluded with the need to clarify the TPACK framework and extend its usefulness in describing and predicting teacher practices. To this end, the study investigated teachers’ TPACK in practice as situated within teaching domains identified in the original PPST framework. In the conduct of the study, the content-specific nature of TPACK was assumed; hence, only Secondary English teachers’ technology integration practices were covered.

In the completion of the three rounds of data gathering using Delphi technique, the Secondary English teachers’ used technology tools, manners of using them, and reasons for using them were documented. First, the teachers’ practices were analyzed under the broad realms of teaching as a process, namely planning, implementation, and evaluation. Then, more specific and emergent domains, the conceptual classifications of teacher practices, were used to group indicators related to each teaching process. From here, the indicators were used to express the observable technology integration practices of teachers believed to embody their TPACK in practice. It is important to note here that the TPACK-in-practice indicators are results of the synthesis of what tools the teachers used, how they used them, and for what reasons.

Overall, the study documented distinct specificity in depicting teachers’ TPACK-in-practice compared to the large body of TPACK literature that only referred to teachers’ general integration of technology, pedagogy, and content in their classrooms. In fact, the specificity of teacher practices derived from collecting teacher narratives allowed the analysis of novel technology tools particular for language teaching (e.g., Reading Intelligibility tools, YouTube captions, YouGlish). More so, the study clarified both the content-specific and context-specific nature of teachers’ TPACK after analyzing the teacher narratives. On the one hand, the teachers’ use of technology in relation to principles of language teaching (e.g., delivering explicit instruction, providing scaffolding, using authentic language examples) confirmed the need for further research to describe teachers’ TPACK with particularity for content areas. On the other hand, the observable presence of Cultural/Institutional factors influencing teachers’ technology integration practices declare that TPACK shall be studied in consideration of contextual factors. This finding confirms the value of generating a local technology integration framework for the Philippines, especially after noting that a number of indicators documented in the study do not relate to existing indicators from other TPACK literature, but rather to the indicators in PPST.

In the end, the study proposed a new model of TPACK that not only displays specific and observable technology integration practices, but as well updates the existing PPST framework. In total, the proposed TPACK-in-Practice model for Secondary English teachers is comprised of three processes (planning, implementation, and evaluation), 15 domains, and 80 indicators.

Considering the generated model and updated framework, the study offered numerous implications both in theory and practice. Recommendations on how the methodology and findings of the study may benefit a wide range of stakeholders are provided.

Abstract Format

html

Language

English

Format

Electronic

Physical Description

457 leaves

Keywords

English language—Study and teaching; Educational technology; English teachers; Teaching—Aids and devices

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Embargo Period

10-12-2027

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