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.
Index Terms—Digital technology, English education,
grammar, university, Thailand.
Budsaba Kanoksilapatham is with the Faculty of Management Science,
Silpakorn University, Thailand (e-mail: kanoksib@hotmail.com).
Cite: Budsaba Kanoksilapatham, "Digital Technology in English Education: Linguistic Gain and Pain Points," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 346-351, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).