Digital technology in English teaching: how much difference has it made? A personal view

By Penny Ur.

Like many other professionals involved in ELT, I’ve inevitably become interested in recent years in issues surrounding the use of digital technology. I’ve been asking myself the question in the title of this article and trying to answer itby: discussing their experiences with colleagues teaching in schools or involved in in-service teacher education,reading what the experts have written, watching YouTube, looking up the research, and spending hours experimenting with the various online tools and, more recently, AI.? Then about a year ago, Cambridge University Press and Assessment asked me if I’d like to do a new edition of A Course in English Language Teaching, which would have to include an updated chapter on digital technology… So, what with one thing and another, I really got into this issue, and this article represents some resulting thoughts and interim conclusions.

In general

To start with an obvious statement:of course digital technology has made a difference to our teaching; not only through basic facilities that have been with us for decades, like word-processing or the Internet and search engines, but through those used much more widely in more recent years such as videoconferencing tools, and the various AI apps now cheaply, often freely, available.

It’s important, however, to keep a sense of proportion. The technology has made a difference to teaching - it hasn’t revolutionized it (as claimed by some enthusiasts). Some very basic components of good teaching have not changed, and in my view, will not change in the future, even if the dream of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence which can totally replace human thinking) is realized.

What has changed?

Let’s look first at what has changed, or is changing, as a result of widespread use of digital technology. Here are some examples.

• Faster and more efficient production of teaching materials: spoken and written texts, visual materials, videos
• Feedback and correction facilities: through automated writing evaluation tools, or, more recently, ones which provide feedback on spoken input
• Practice of productive skills: computer-mediated communication via messaging tools or an AI interlocutor using a chatbot
• Development of texts tailored to specific groups of learners: tools that translate, simplify or elaborate texts to ensure they are appropriate, or provide extra input.

All these are, however only because of tools: they make our job as teachers a lot easier, mainly because they enable us to do many routine tasks much more quickly.? An important outcome of all this is, therefore, to free up time to devote to things which only a human teacher can do: personal interactions with students, the creation of a warm and supportive classroom climate, being more sensitive to the social-emotional learning (SEL) component in our courses, increasing student autonomy and agency. And above all - the heart of good teaching – ensuring and checking that our particular class or student(s) in our particular context do learn effectively, and feel good about their own progress.

So given that human teachers are still essentially in charge of the teaching/learning process, and that the digital technology provides tools to enhance it – we need to know how to use such tools skillfully and effectively. The crucial questions we need to ask ourselves when using any one of them are:

1. How much time, effort and money are required to prepare and use this tool relative to the learning or motivational benefits?
2. If I am using a digital component in a lesson: what did I sacrifice or omit from the lesson in order to include it? Was it worth it?

Let me illustrate this by looking at some examples of less effective and more effective use of such tools.

Less effective use of technology

One example of the use of digital resources in the classroom on which extensive research has been done is DDL (data-driven learning). The students examine primary data based on a corpus – for example, a concordance, like that shown below, to check out the most common collocations of a particular word, or the differences in meaning or context between two synonyms, or what the most common meaning of a word is. In this case, the students have been asked to find out what the most common meaning is of the word pretty.

Clearly from this random selection from the Cambridge corpus, pretty is only rarely used to mean ‘nice-looking’; it is far more likely to function as an adverb qualifying an adjective, meaning ‘quite’. Interesting. But the question is: was it worth the amount of work by students accessing, displaying, reading and drawing conclusions from the concordance (only a small random selection of which is shown here), relative to the amount of learning? Would it not have been a better use of time for the teacher just to explain this point to students and then add a few examples, or get students to provide examples themselves? I am not suggesting that learners should never do this type of task; only that in most situations it is not an optimal use of the technology according to the criteria above.

Effective use of digital technology in the classroom

One very effective use of technology is the composition of texts and exercises that are suitable for our students. For example, when teaching a new text in a coursebook:

·?The teacher can check out how useful / frequent any new vocabulary is, using a vocabulary profiler such as Text Inspector (https://textinspector.com/ ), which will indicate which items are probably most worth focusing on. Even here, however, there is a need for the individual teacher’s professional judgment - vocabulary profilers do not always identify lexical chunks (multi-word items such as by the way), and there may be items that for cultural reasons are more, or less, important for a particular set of students to know.

·?Standard AI tools like Copilot(previously Bing), Gemini(previously Bard)or Claude can very quicklycreate simpler or more elaborate texts, suitable for different levels in the class.

·?If the teacher wants a new text that includes the new vocabulary in order to provide more exposure to the items in a different context (what is called ‘narrow reading’). Again these AI tools can create such texts in an instant.

·?Apps like twee.com can create text-based exercises or tasks of varied type.

And for the students: the use of AWE (automized writing evaluation) tools such as Grammarly can clearly help them improve the accuracy and style of their own writing; and today there are similar AI tools which can help them improve their speech. But even here, a teacher will need also to check and give their own feedback. AI tools today are far better than ever before, but there are still occasional slips, oversights and ‘hallucinations’; overall, optimum results are likely to be obtained by a combination of teacher and technology (for some interesting insights on this topic, see Ethan Mollick’s website One useful thing (https://www.oneusefulthing.org/ ).

And I have to add an extra section to supplement the above: let’s not allow our enthusiasm for high-tech to blind us to the essential place of low-tech materials in our classrooms.

The importance of low-tech tools

Most people, if asked whether they prefer reading lengthy texts from paper or from a screen, will opt for paper. (I actually prefer screen, myself, but am aware that I’m in the minority!). This is not a chance preference, nor has it anything to do with conservatism or conventionalism.? Research indicates that most people actually understand better if they read from paper (Mangen et al., 2013), that learners will learn vocabulary better if they look it up in a print dictionary than if they use a digital one (Chiu & Liu, 2013), and that words are better retained if hand-written (Mangen et al., 2015). It seems that there is a genuine advantage for the use of (pen and) paper as compared to (keyboard and) screen for some basic learning processes.

By the way, a useful low-tech piece of equipment which has become popular lately is the mini-whiteboard: easy and fun to use, it is a learner-friendly and cheaper alternative to writing brief texts or drawing on the tablet computer. See, for example, Mini-Whiteboards are an Awesome Teaching Tool for EFL Classes ( starteachertraining.com ) .

A final anecdote

Years ago, I participated in a session in my college about the use of digital technology in teaching – at the time fairly new to most of the audience. I raised a question along the lines above: that there is a place also for low-tech, combined with high-tech, in our teaching, and for conventional teacher input – and in his response, the presenter labelled me a ‘technophobe’. Maybe I am, a bit: I certainly cannot aspire to the familiarity, expertise and smooth functioning of my children, or even grandchildren,relating to the various digital facilities available today. But perhaps a more appropriate description of people like me would be ‘techno-cautious’: use the technology by all means – you would be foolish not to – but be careful while doing so that it does repay your investment in time, effort and money, and does actually bring about the outcomes that you hope for.

Chiu, L. and Liu, G. (2013). Effects of printed, pocket electronic, and online dictionaries on high school students’ English vocabulary retention. The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 22(4), 619–634.

Mangen, A., Walgermo, B. R. and Br?nnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. International Journal of Educational Research, 58, 61–68.

Mangen, A., Anda, L. G., Oxborough, G. H., &Br?nnick, K. (2015). Handwriting versus keyboard writing: Effect on word recall.?Journal of Writing Research,?7(2), 227-247.

Ur, P. (2024). A Course in English Language Teaching (3rd? Edition).? Cambridge University Press & Assessment.