Abstract:

This study explores Swedish primary school teachers' experiences of using personalised learning applications in a system which supports students’ reading skill development in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. The system runs on tablets and includes two student applications. One application, the reader app, contains a digital library of texts and offers textual enhancement functionalities to support learning needs. The other application contains a series of mini-games which includes an adaptive mechanism that suggests suitable activities for each individual student. The system also includes a teacher tool which allows the teacher to organise and assign learning activities for particular students, and follow their progress. We focus on teachers’ experiences of using personalised learning applications in the English classroom, as understanding the context in which such technologies are used contributes to generating nuanced knowledge of language learning in the digitalised classroom. The study is part of a larger project focusing on developing personalised learning technologies for supporting students’ reading skills.

The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 10 primary school teachers who used the applications in the English classroom between 2-6 months. All teachers were interviewed before, during and after having used the applications in their teaching. However, this study draws only on the teachers’ experiences from using the technologies. All interviews were transcribed and coded to identify patterns and variations in the data.

Our analysis shows that the teachers in the study find large differences between the students in their classes regarding their competence in English. The teachers said that using personalised learning applications to support language development is a promising way to mitigate these differences as they provide opportunities for individual students to work at their own level. The applications are designed not to indicate the level to the students, which means that when all students work on their own tablets it is not visible to others what level they are at. This gives them the freedom to work on an activity at their own pace. The teachers appreciate that using personalised learning applications contributes to bringing variation to the students’ learning environment. Our study shows that personalised learning tools have the potential to facilitate personalised learning. However, lack of time and technical problems are often seen as challenges for successful appropriation of such technologies into the digitalised classroom.

Keywords:

ESL, Sweden, digital technologies, teachers, personalised learning.