Information and communication technologies in the Chilean English as a foreign language classroom: A systematic review of the literature

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) permeated Chilean schools in the late 1990s with the implementation of Enlaces, a national program including training and technological equipment for supplying school education. Since then, the curricular relevance of ICTs has increased in Chile. Particularly, English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching has benefited from ICTs in adding interaction and using various resources in the classroom. Such importance motivated the researchers of this study to find out what has been researched about ICT in the English classroom in a Chilean context. To attain this, a systematic review of the literature from 2006 to 2022 was conducted. Data was drawn from the electronic databases SCOPUS, EBSCO, Scielo, ERIC, Dialnet, WoS, and complemented with Google Scholar. The selected studies, 13, were analyzed using a six-dimensional framework, focusing on research purpose and focus, outcomes, design and methods, publication frequency, and limitations. Our review has established that qualitative design and methods have been the most predominant approaches, focusing mainly on exploring the implementation and integration of ICTs in the English classroom, as well as examining the effectiveness of applications, websites, and ICTs tools on the linguistic attainment of Chilean school learners. This systematic review has also identified that after 2016 publications have been steady, yet the number of empirical studies exploring the topic is still limited, which constitutes a research gap that future studies could examine. It is also expected that researchers interested in the topic could try out this review in similar EFL contexts

Collaborative learning and classroom engagement: A pedagogical experience in an EFL Chilean context

In the context of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), there is growing attention towards collaborative learning and learners’ engagement. Despite the interest on these topics, there is little research in Chile, in the English classroom, about both collaborative learning and learners’ engagement at a school level. Therefore, this study emerged to explore and describe the impact of collaborative-based instruction on learners’ engagement during an intervention of five weeks in a private-subsidized school in the city of Chillan. The participants of the study were 62 female and 70 male students, aged 15 to 17. Based on an action research methodology, the researchers used quantitative and qualitative techniques to collect data which comprised a Likert test (adapted from Alsowat, 2016) administered before and after the intervention, and unstructured observation registered in every lesson by means of field notes learnt from Efrat & Ravid (2020). Our results show that collaborative learning has a direct relationship with learners’ engagement, evidenced in our four classes where behavioral engagement was predominant. Future studies may investigate whether the use of collaborative learning tasks, over a longer period, would still maintain learners’ engagement in the EFL classroom as well as whether behavioral engagement is the most salient dimension among their students