The Digital Natives of Second Language Learning: English Instruction Utilizing Technology at Sto. tomas North Central School

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Digital natives, the net-generation, the digital-generation, and millenniums are all labels to identify today's learners. Prensky (2001) created the term digital native in his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants to describe the generation of learners growing up interacting with digital technology. Challenged by the words of Pensky, the researcher come up with an idea of fusing the use of technology in teaching English to the digital native pupils of Sto. Tomas North Central School. The purpose of the research study was to discover if integrating technology into instruction improves student academic achievement.

METHODS

The respondents of the study were 83 Grade 3 pupils of Sto. Tomas North Central School. One group was comprised of 43 participants. The next group was 40 participants and a collaborative teacher worked with the classroom teacher. The average age for a grade three student is 8 to 9 years old. The study was a non-equivalent control group design purposely using random assignment of treatment employing a pre-test and post-test. Random allocation limits bias by employing a double-blind experiment so the statistician will not know which group received which treatment. Random assignment was employed to select the control group for English. A coin toss was the method of random assignment used to make the selection.

RESULTS

Comparing the highest and lowest scores using two different techniques in teaching; students thought with technological aided instruction scored 95%, 93%, and 91% as top score percentage with 88%,86% and 84% low score percentage while students who were thought of the same lesson using lecture method scored 90%, 88% and 85% as top score percentage and 83% and 80% as low score percentage. Inferential statistics revealed that there was a significant difference between the pretest and post-test. These findings showed that technological instruction is effective in enhancing the pupil's academic performance and recommended to be used during intervention programs.

DISCUSSIONS

Most learners taught with technological inputs performed better compared to that of those pupils that undergo traditional means of learning. This simply provides an array of idea to all teachers to find efforts in building educative class in a more sophisticated manner of teaching by applying Web 2.0 technology.