Digital professional development: Can it improve language teachers’ sense of competence, autonomy and relatedness?

Abstract

In the UK, as in many other contexts, primary school foreign language learning (PFL) suffers from teacher supply issues related to a lack of language-specific expertise or training for teachers who are generalist teachers, or a limited sense of relatedness to the wider school curriculum for those who are language specialist teachers (Seymour, 2018). These issues pose threats to PFL teachers’
motivation, especially to their sense of autonomy, relatedness and competence (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Digital Professional Development (DPD) has been found to promote language teachers’ sense of competence, autonomy and relatedness (Haukås et al., 2022). Yet there is little evidence on exactly how DPD has this effect or about the relationship between all these aspects of teacher motivation
within a DPD context.
This presentation reports on a research project that aimed to address these research gaps by investigating the role of technology within a programme of DPD. Thirty-five PFL teachers participated in approximately 12 hours of DPD that focused on the development of learner PFL literacy, including through using digital storytelling and an AI-powered pronunciation training app. Analysing data collected from questionnaires completed before and after the DPD, alongside interactional teacher data from the DPD digital platform, we present findings that consider how far and in what ways the DPD improved teacher sense of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and hence motivation to teach PFL

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ORCID for Alison Porter: orcid.org/0000-0002-8462-1909

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