Using an ICT tool for teaching English in a rural context ^{4 *}

Abstract

This article reports the results of a study that aimed to examine the impact of an ICT tool for self-learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in a rural context in Chile. The Chilean government has tried to improve communicative competence in EFL for over a decade. In this context, It’s My Turn has been introduced in all the schools of the country’s rural zones. In order to prove its effectiveness, the learning achievements of 76 fifth and sixth grade students from seven rural elementary schools in the Región de los Ríos (RdlR) were measured through input/output tests. At the same time, observations were carried out to examine the tool’s use by the teachers. The results of a t-test showed a significant difference between the input and output tests (p < 0.0001), which supports the program’s effectiveness. Classroom observations revealed heterogeneous methods of implementation and different degrees in the use of the mother tongue and the foreign language, which seemed to have an impact on learning achievements. While recognizing that other factors may be involved, we conclude that It’s my Turn is an effective ICT tool for teaching English in rural contexts in which there would otherwise not be any alternative possibilities to learn the language.

ICT; Self-learning; English as a Foreign Language; Rural Education; English Literacy

Resumen

Este trabajo reporta los resultados de un estudio que buscó examinar el impacto de una herramienta TIC para el autoaprendizaje del inglés como lengua extranjera (ILE) en un contexto rural de Chile. El Estado chileno ha intentado por más de una década mejorar la competencia comunicativa en ILE. En este contexto, se incluyó It’s my Turn en todas las escuelas de zonas rurales del país. Para comprobar su efectividad, se midieron los logros de aprendizaje de 76 estudiantes de quinto y sexto de primaria de siete escuelas rurales de la Región de los Ríos (RdlR) con pruebas de entrada y salida. Al mismo tiempo, se realizaron observaciones para examinar la utilización del recurso por parte de los docentes. Una prueba t arrojó una diferencia significativa entre las pruebas de entrada y salida ( p &lt; 0,0001), lo que respalda la efectividad del programa. Las observaciones en aula pusieron en evidencia métodos heterogéneos de aplicación y distintos grados de utilización de la lengua materna y la lengua extranjera, lo cual tiene un impacto en los logros de aprendizaje. Aunque se reconoce que puede haber otros factores involucrados, se concluye que It’s my Turn es una herramienta TIC efectiva para la enseñanza del inglés en un contexto rural que de otra forma no tendría posibilidades de alfabetización en inglés.

TIC; Autoaprendizaje; Inglés como lengua extranjera; Educación rural; Alfabetización en inglés

Introduction and case analysis

Over the last few years, some Chilean rural contexts have been urbanized, allowing greater access to knowledge, job opportunities, and healthcare coverage. This has mainly occurred in the Metropolitan Region (RM), where Santiago, the capital of Chile, is located. Meanwhile, other contexts in different regions have remained in the same rural situation by which they were historically defined, and therefore in the same vulnerable and inequitable situation. One of the main weaknesses that these rural areas tend to possess is that related to literacy, a core competence required to access knowledge and to decrease socioeconomic and cultural gaps between the city and rural communities and between developed and developing countries. To overcome this reality, various programs have been implemented in order to achieve social equality. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool that was evaluated in this study represents one example of such efforts.

ICT Experiences throughout the world

South Africa has pioneered the use of ICT in rural educational contexts (YAO DZANSI; AMEDZO, 2014; MEERA, 2012). In this country, ICT integration has become the key objective for economic, social, and educational reasons. It is intended to increase employability by encouraging citizens’ participation in the society of knowledge through teaching and learning improvement (YAO DZANSI; AMEDZO, 2014). In other words, it is aimed at enriching people’s life quality through digital literacy initiatives (MEERA, 2012). In this sense, cyberspace allows one to approach the urban (VILCHES, 2001).

India and China have similar contexts. India, on the one hand, is often accused of inadequate teacher training, low availability of instructional material, and poor-quality teaching-learning processes in the rural classroom (NASEEM; KASHYAP; MANDLOI, 2016). This country represents the second largest global market for digital learning, after the United States, but this reality has not managed to reach many of the rural areas of India, mainly because of lack of resources. Nevertheless, there are digital education experiences that have had a positive impact on rural education through virtual laboratories and electronic libraries (NASEEM; KASHYAP; MANDLOI, 2016). In this context, ICT resources are being considered as a force to achieve equality between urban and rural educational systems. China, on the other hand, sees in ICT a tangible opportunity to improve citizens’ lives in rural areas. It is believed that Internet access can contribute to greater access to information related to agriculture and livestock, public service offerings, and educational and health knowledge (THE WORLD BANK, 2014). Therefore, ICT is considered a way to connect the urban and rural world.

As a region, Latin America presents similar characteristics to the nations mentioned above. The rural world is often separated from the urban world, with all the consequences that this entails: low quality education leading to lessened development opportunities, or a lack of what is understood as “[...] the process that lead to sustainable improvement of the quality of life of the rural poor [sic]” (MEERA, 2012, p. 355). In Peru, for example, it is understood that ICT inclusion in rural areas occurs in response to an urgent need to effectively access and use the information, all while taking into account specific social and cultural characteristics of its people (BUSTAMANTE; ALVARADO, 2009).

The Chilean reality is not distant from the other national contexts described thus far. One of the governmental initiatives to reduce the gap between the urban and the rural has been the inclusion of ICT at a general educational level. For example, public schools receive digital didactic material, computers, image projectors, and other related resources on a regular basis, allowing them to be more connected with each other and with the rest of the world via the Internet (CHILE, 2017 a).

ICT and English

Digital literacy and English literacy go hand-in-hand. This is because both types of knowledge are generally considered to be fundamental to social development and mobility. Nevertheless, although ICT is presented as an effective source for education, there are very few initiatives that take advantage of these resources to teach and learn English in rural school contexts with positive results. One example, within the framework of Colombia’s National Bilingualism Plan 2004-2019, is that the nation has invested extensively in implementing ICT tools for learning English. Through this program, Colombia aims to train citizens to communicate in English in compliance with international standards that allow the country to be part of the global economy and culture (COLOMBIA, 2017). Results, however, have not shown to be fully effective at any level. Jaimes and Jaimes (2015) suggest that such outcomes are mainly due to the fact that, on one hand, there is not enough teaching staff with high-level skills in the foreign language, and, on the other, teachers have not been trained properly in ICT use. This weakness is also present in Chile (LIZASOAIN; BECCHI, 2014; GARCÍA; FERREIRA; MORALES, 2012; HEINZ; LARA, 2011).

In Chile, within the English Opens Doors Program (Inglés Abre Puertas) created by the federal government in 2004, rural schools have only been included in initiatives for improving the quality of teaching-learning processes of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) since 2010. Like Colombia’s National Bilingualism Plan 2004-2019, the program Inglés Abre Puertas attempts to improve students’ communicative competence in English from fifth grade through the final year of secondary school (CHILE, 2017 b). Recognizing that the majority of the rural English teachers do not possess background in the field of study, an educational tool has been implemented for self-learning–the program It’s My Turn (ImT)–to offer similar opportunities to students of urban and rural areas (CHILE, 2017 c). The initial aim was to promote EFL learning among students and teachers, turning the latter into learners and mediators of the acquisition learning at the same time (CHILE, 2017 c). The program’s effectiveness was evaluated for the first time in 2012, when a short action research project took place in three rural schools in the south of Chile (LIZASOAIN; BECCHI, 2014). It was found that the tool was in fact promoting English learning among students, but there was a need to make changes related to the use of the tool by the teachers.

It’s my Turn is an ICT tool that fosters the learning of lexical and grammatical contents in English through videos that promote interactive simulation that are designed for students in fifth and sixth grade (between 10 and 12 years old). The tool presents material for both teachers and students. The teacher has a set of five DVDs with prerecorded lessons, a teacher’s guide, a CD-ROM with English songs and rhymes, a CD-ROM with instructions, a Schedule Notebook, and another notebook for Assessment. Students have access to a textbook and a bilingual dictionary. The set for the fifth grade is aimed especially at word acquisition and basic lexico-grammatical structures.

Lessons progress in two interrelated contexts. The first one is a virtual reality: students interact with video characters (students of a rural school, the teacher, and a classmate from the United States). Figure 1 is an image of the teacher (Mr. Campos), three Chilean students (to the left) and the foreign visitor. The second context is an imaginative scene: a tree in the school’s yard, where four Chilean native animals live: a chinchilla, a pudu (small deer), a loica (meadowlark), and an armadillo. This was meant to contextualize learning according to the well-known wildlife of Chilean rural areas.

Figure 1
Main characters of It’s my Turn.

In 2013 and 2014, an investigation team⁴ of five Chilean universities and a rural school conducted a study to evaluate the effectiveness of It’s my Turn in two regions of the country: The Metropolitan Region and the Región de los Ríos, which possess different demographic characteristics (see Table 1). Based on input and output tests, it was shown that the program contributes, to a certain extent, to English learning in a rural context in the Metropolitan area. Classroom observations, however, suggested a problem for the interpretation of the results: teachers were using ImT in different ways. This led to the conclusion that in the Metropolitan Region, the tool works like any other learning mediator and that the teacher is the main agent of foreign language acquisition (LIZASOAIN et al., 2016).

Table 1
Demographic characteristics of the regions under study

	Urban inhabitants	Rural inhabitants	Total
Región Metropolitana	7,092,988	221,188	7,314,176
Región de los Ríos	278,957	125,475	404,432

Source: Data obtained from the National Statistics Institute (2016).

Because of the vast differences between the Metropolitan Region (Región Metropolitana, RM) and the rest of Chile, it was agreed that it was relevant to replicate the study in another region. The Región de los Ríos (RdlR) was selected as the study area of the research team. The RM contains around 40% of the Chilean population, while the RdlR has around 2%. Furthermore, the difference in the proportion of rural inhabitants is huge: in the RM they constitute up to 3%, while in RdlR, up to 31%. Concerning population density, the RM has 475 inhabitants per km² while the RdlR has 22 inhabitants per km² (INSTITUTO…, 2017). The RdlR has a smaller number of inhabitants than the RM, but a far greater proportion of these live in rural contexts. In order to fully understand rurality in the Región de los Ríos, the rural and its implications in education must be defined.

Rural Life

The rural is associated with special relationships between space, society, economy, and culture (WILLIAMSON, 2004). Rural areas are characterized by their low population density, which means that small societies live in large spaces (ATCHOARENA; GASPERINI, 2003). In Chile, the average number of inhabitants of a given rural community–who inhabit small villages or hamlets–is up to 2,000 (WILLIAMSON, 2004). People who live in these contexts develop economical activities related to their country and history, such as mining, fisheries, agricultural production, and activities in special interest tourism (CHILE, 2017 d). Rural life also implies special cultural production and reproduction processes, including languages, arts, and literature (WILLIAMSON, 2004). Generally, these are territories that have been associated with poverty, hunger, and low literacy (ATCHOARENA; GASPERINI, 2003).

Despite this, “[...] the rural is not only a setting […]. On the contrary, the rural is generative of educational, social and methodological insights” (ROBERTS; CUERVO, 2015, p. 3). These educational insights consider education to be a way to escape from rural life when it is equated with poverty (RIVERA; RIVERA; DÍAZ-PUENTE, 2015; ATCHOARENA; GASPERINI, 2003). In fact, the school–a space where education takes place in the Western world–is the process and the product of a given cultural replication. That is, the teacher is responsible for reproducing either poverty or development.

In Chile, most rural schools are located in isolated areas without basic services such as potable water, electricity, or Internet access (CHILE, 2007). They host a limited number of students and they are single-teacher schools; that is, there is only one teacher in classrooms that include multiple grade levels. Teaching material is usually scarce, limited to few textbooks. Moreover, they could be complete (all the elementary levels) or incomplete (up to sixth grade) and, at the same time, they can have one level per classroom or they can be multi-grade (more than one level in the same classroom) (WILLIAMSON, 2004). These characteristics, in addition to poverty, define students’ integral development, putting their access to a better-quality life at stake.

This rural context description, while true for most of the nation, does not coincide with the rural schools studied in the Metropolitan Region (LIZASOAIN et al., 2016). Although they are considered rural schools, the majority of them have basic services such as potable water, electricity, television, and Internet. Furthermore, in spite of the Ministry of Education’s expectations (CHILE, 2017 c), the teachers are indeed specialized in English. Consequently, the RM rural schools are similar to urban establishments. In fact, the RM rural teachers prefer to be considered urban (LIZASOAIN et al., 2016). Faced with this reality, it is reasonable to test the effectiveness of It’s my Turn in rural contexts apart from those in the surroundings of country’s main metropolis. Before describing the study carried out in RdlR rural schools, we shall first review the ImT design’s foundations.

Digital Literacy

Literacy is a set of linguistic and cognitive mechanisms contributing to participation in different discursive practices. Specifically, digital literacy permits interaction with digital interfaces, such as computers, smart phones, and televisions (YAO DZANSI; AMEDZO, 2014). In this context, it also represents a problem-solving capacity related to information exchange, knowledge, and communication situations (CHILE, 2017e).

These interfaces weigh so heavily on daily life that not knowing how to use them turns citizens into digital illiterates. That is, such a lack of knowledge alienates people and does not allow a way of being and acting in the world for the person of today (CASTELLS, 1997). In this sense, the inclusion of digital literacy in the school is a natural phenomenon for knowledge acquisition and production.

Information and Communication Technology in the School

ICT has changed teachers’ ways of teaching and students’ ways of learning. Such tools are commonly defined as global networks for information and knowledge exchange through communication technologies, such as cellphones and computers, whose main function is to connect people (YAO DZANSI; AMEDZO, 2014; VILCHES, 2001). In this sense, its inclusion in schools is part of the policy of digital literacy promotion that seeks to develop knowledge exchange competences. The use of ICT tools is considered crucial to achieve important learning goals for today’s students (CHIAPPE, 2009).

Educational ICT tools present innumerous classroom advantages. For example, they motivate students’ autonomous learning (CHIAPPE, 2009); they foster learning, encouraging simultaneous information storage and memorization (ÁLVAREZ; ÁLVAREZ, 2012); and they allow for better use of time in the classroom, being a prefabricated teaching material. This last point becomes important in the rural Chilean classroom, where there are only three teaching hours assigned to English per week (approximately two-and-a-half hours in chronological terms). Despite these benefits, possible disadvantages must also be recognized. Spitzer (2013) warns against the risks of large-scale continuous and permanent exposure to digital media, which can affect attention span as well as language and intelligence development. This is because the brain is exposed to a high information load that does not permit it to process and convert what is received into learning. Vilches (2001) also reveals a false interactivity between machines and humans that only promotes information exchange and not knowledge acquisition. Related to this,

[…] to acquire knowledge from some sources, to investigate with critical spirit, to deliberate, to explore the very sources, to compose the details of a puzzle to transform it to a unit of meaning, all of this we must do by ourselves in order to know how to do it one day.

(SPITZER, 2013, p. 3, translated to English)

We should ask, then, if ICT resources can foster the learning of such complex knowledge as language.

It’s my Turn: A Self-learning Tool for English as a Foreign Language in a Rural Context.

There is evidence that ICT tools contribute to foreign languages acquisition, promoting teachers’ and students’ cooperative work and encouraging learners’ communicative competence through autonomous learning (CLAVIJO; QUINTANA; QUINTERO, 2012; GARCÍA; FERREIRA; MORALES, 2012). Taking into account the nature of rural education, the Chilean Ministry of Education developed an instrument adjusted to this context in order to assist teachers who do not possess EFL specialization. This is how It’s my Turn was born—it is an ICT tool meant for the agents of a rural educational system who could not have effective access to English without it.

The basis of ImT is not only the relation of ICT and today’s society, but also the theories associated with the teaching and learning of foreign languages. It’s my Turn is based on the concept that the language being learned is foreign: it is a language that is not spoken in any national territory and is learned for external motivations. These motivations include accessing better work and educational opportunities as well as communicating with native speakers. Thus, contextualizing knowledge is crucial.

The design of ImT is based on the Natural Approach to second language acquisition in contexts where they are the national and/or official languages, such as in Canada, where English and French are spoken as first or second languages (KRASHEN; TERREL, 1977). The Natural Approach asserts that the second language (L2) can be fostered if the same logic of the development of the mother tongue is followed. This includes emphasizing communicative fluency over correction, teaching vocabulary and syntactical structures in an implicit way, and exposing students to authentic and comprehensible linguistic input (KRASHEN, 1985). The use of the mother tongue (L1) is prohibited in the formal learning setting. In this way, students are meant to learn the foreign language instead of learning about it (metalanguage), the latter being a common phenomenon in foreign language instruction in formal education contexts in Chile.

The national curriculum for Foreign Language: English explicitly promotes the teaching of the language through the Communicative Approach (CHILE, 2009). Based on the Natural Approach, the Communicative Approach aims at language development through the significant use of language in the classroom (RICHARDS; ROGERS, 2008), offering the learner simulated situations of real communication. The purpose is for the learner to associate new knowledge with her own world experiences and at the same time use it to pursue her communicative goals. In this context, the L1 is not strictly excluded from the classroom, since it can be used in context for new knowledge development.

Based on this learning approach, the ImT program seeks to foment communicative competence through the learning of basic linguistic content related to everyday life elements. These items are presented in English as well as in Spanish during the first lessons in such a way that the student is able to relate what she already knows with new knowledge and integrate it into her linguistic repertoire. Progressively, the use of the L1 is abandoned. ImT intends to link three general knowledge areas of a language: basic vocabulary (colors, fruit, pets, body parts); grammatical phenomena (prepositions, verbs, adjectives); and communicative functions (greeting, introducing, expressing preference). The objective is for the learner to be able to describe a reality she already knows with the lexico-grammar of the foreign language. Moreover, knowledge is contextualized within areas of the general curriculum, such as natural and social sciences and mathematics, as well as through the incorporation of native vegetation and wildlife of different rural zones of the country. Finally, the program offers interactive situations between the interface and the students so that they can conceive English as a kind of interactional knowledge. Interaction takes place through questions that are asked by the characters and answered by the students in order to be evaluated by teachers, whose assessment can be based on their own knowledge or on the notes offered in the teacher’s book. Figure 2 presents an illustration of this interaction between the teacher, the students, and ImT.

Material and Methods

This is an evaluative case study (COHEN; MANION; MANION, 2007) that took place in seven schools in the Región de los Ríos in the south of Chile. The aim was to measure an ICT resource’s effectiveness as an English self-learning tool in rural areas based on input/output tests and classroom observations.

Participants

In Chile there are approximately 15,900 schools, of which roughly 4,930 are rural (CHILE, 2016); in other words, 30% of Chilean schools are located in rural contexts. Four hundred and fifty two (452) of them are spread throughout the Región de los Ríos, one of the 15 regions of the country. The RdlR is nearly 18,500 km² in land area and is home to around 405,000 inhabitants, with almost 125,500 residing rural areas (LOS RÍOS, 2017; INSTITUTO…, 2017). Because of its geographical characteristics, many areas are difficult to access—it is often necessary to pass through mountains or cross rivers and lakes. The seven schools that participated in this study shared these characteristics; indeed, in one of the establishments, students and staff had to arrive by boat and under difficult weather conditions caused of the region’s heavy rains. The schools’ names have been modified to protect their identity.

Teachers

Six teachers participated. One of them was a specialist in English; four of them possessed with certificates or had taken courses that enabled them to teach English⁵; and one of them did not have any English teaching preparation recognized by the Chilean government. One of the teachers worked in two schools.

Students

The achievements of 76 students between the ages of 10 and 12 were measured. Table 2 details the number of students per school. All the classrooms were multi-grade, but only the students of fifth and sixth grade were evaluated, because both levels were using the fifth-grade elementary material. Recently, in 2013, the sixth-grade elementary material started to be distributed to educational institutions. The schools in this study worked with the fifth-grade elementary set, since the sixth-grade set had not been received yet from the Ministry of Education. Both grades worked with the same material simultaneously.

Table 2
Interaction among students, teachers and It’s my Turn.

Commune	Panguipulli		Coñaripe		Liquiñe
School	San Marcos	Los Tallos	Cui Cui	La Escondida	El Rincón	Lago Pellaifa	Las Trancas	Total
Nr.	12	16	16	3	6	14	9	76

Source: created by the authors for this study’s purposes

Figure 2
Interaction among students, teachers and It’s my Turn.

Investigation Tools

Input and Output Tests

The input and output tests were implemented at the beginning and at the end of the first academic semester. The first test diagnosed previous knowledge related to prepositions, numbers, colors, family members, role plays, classroom objects, and the days of the week. The output test measured the students’ achievement related to the contents of the input test. Both tests were adapted from the program’s Assessment Notebook. The results of the students who did not take both tests were eliminated. Although the contents were the same, the formulation of the two tests was different in order to prevent students from remembering the items of the initial evaluation and responding automatically. According to the design of the evaluations in the Assessment Notebook, test instructions were presented in both English and Spanish.

The answers were considered partially correct if they reflected the pronunciation of the words in English. For example, if they wrote mother as mader, it would be considered partially correct. This is because work in class was multimodal and it was assumed that students knew writing as well as word pronunciation.

Observation Notes

Two or three observations per classroom were carried out, each between 45 and 90 minutes, according to each teacher’s availability. For this reason, a non-participation observation notebook was used, which allowed a detailed description of the communication that took place in the classroom, including the language in use (mother tongue or foreign language), activities undertaken, students’ organization, revision of contents, and utilization of materials.

Analysis and Results

The input and output tests were revised using the same correction notes and the same scoring range, the latter obtained by the scoring generator Pumarino (2017). A score of 60% correct answers was required for a mark of 4.0, a convention used in most Chilean schools. The Chilean grading scale includes marks from 1.0 to 7.0; the mark 4.0 is considered low but satisfactory and allows the passing of a course. In order to compare the results of both tests, a t-test of two-tailed independent samples was used. A two-tailed test was selected assuming that there was no significant difference. The null hypothesis argued that It’s my Turn would not affect the learning, in other words that there would not be any difference between the input and output test results. The alternative hypothesis, on the contrary, was that a statistical significant difference (p < 0.05) would be observed between the results of both tests.

An analysis of generic type (CRESWELL, 2009) was also carried out to test the qualitative data of the classroom observations, which were transformed into descriptions of how ImT was used and the degree of L1 and L2 use in the classroom.

Learning Achievements

The input test showed the dominance of some contents, such as numbers and colors, and the lack of knowledge of more complex topics, such as prepositions. Writing production ability was not developed further than the writing of isolated words, which was usually inaccurate. The results were generally low, below the satisfactory mark (4.0). Nevertheless, all schools witnessed an increase in their scores. Table 3 shows the results from both tests and their differences based on the t-test for each school.

Table 3
Input and Output test results of the Región de los Ríos.

Commune	Panguipulli		Coñaripe				Liquiñe
School	San Marcos	Los Tallos	Cui Cui	La Escondida	El Rincón	Lago Pellaifa	Las Trancas	X
X Input	4.1	2.4	3.5	3.2	4.4	2.8	3.9	3.47 SD=1.03
X Output	4.6	2.7	3.7	3.6	4.8	3.1	4.4	3.84 SD=1.26
P	0.005	0.0001	0.32	0.02	0.01	0.0001	0.00013

Source: Created by the authors for the purpose of this study.

The t-test implemented in all school results also showed a significant difference (t (74) = -7.004; p < 0.0001) between the input and output tests. Accordingly, it can be said that the ImT tool contributes to English learning as a mediation instrument for learning (CHIAPPE, 2009). The students learned new features of English thanks to an ICT self-learning tool. The interaction with the video characters promoted learning, as did the use of textbooks and dictionaries. It can also be said that the Natural and Communicative Approaches can be effective since they permit students to acquire a foreign language in significant teaching contexts. In other words, the Inglés Abre Puertas program has succeeded in the design and in the implementation of an instrument that contributes to knowledge access. Despite this, differences were observed in the use of the instrument as well as in the use of the L1 and FL by the teachers, and it is worthwhile to ask how the learning results were affected by such differences. This question is discussed in the conclusion of the article.

Implementation in the Classroom

The classroom observations revealed that every teacher was implementing the ImT tool according to their local context and their training preparation. There were teachers that based their lessons exclusively on the program, using the complete ImT set of material. Others combined ImT with complementary instruments such as work guides, songs, images, classroom items, and additional material bought from the market, such as flashcards, posters, and games. Finally, there were teachers who, in spite of the fact that they said they were using ImT, actually did not use it in any of the classes observed.

Regarding the use of Spanish (L1) and English (FL), there were two general patterns: 1) partial use of FL and 2) pervasive use of L1. In the first case, teachers were using FL to greet, give simple instructions, and pose basic questions or provide feedback. The L1 was used to give more complex explanations or to translate the FL right away. This practice was frequent for the teachers with low levels of English and in the presence of students with special educational needs (SEN)⁶. In the second situation, teachers were only using English in exceptional situations. Some examples drawn from the classroom observations by the investigators are presented below:

1. Teacher 3: Si no entendieron, podemos retroceder el video. (Only L1)

2. Teacher 5: How are you today? ¿No entiende? Ok. ¿Estás fine, so or bad? (Showing the meaning by hands). Ahora sí, How are you today? (L1 and FL)

3. Teacher 1: Who can tell me what’s the meaning of this? (Showing a phrase on the blackboard) (Only FL)

Discussion and Conclusions

On the basis of these considerations, the need to compare quantitative and qualitative variables arose in order to test possible correlations. Table 4 shows how this information was systematized.

Table 4
Statistical significance, usage of It’s my Turn and use of L1 and FL.

School IM-OM P ImT usage L1 and FL use
Las Trancas	0.5	< 0.0001	Systematic use almost exclusive	Teacher without FL knowledge. Limited L1 use. Low teacher intervention.
Los Tallos	0.3	< 0.0001	Partial use and other strategies	Teacher without FL knowledge. Mainly L1 used.
Lago Pellaifa	0.3	< 0.0001	Partial use and other strategies	Teacher without FL knowledge. Mainly L1 used.
San Marcos	0.5	= 0.005	Partial use and other strategies	B2 level teacher. Mainly FL used.
El Rincón	0.4	= 0.01	Partial use and other strategies	A2 level teacher. L1 y FL used proportionally.
La Escondida	0.4	= 0.02	No use	B1 level teacher. L1 y FL used proportionally. Immediate translation lo L1.
Cui Cui	0.2	= 0.32	Partial use and other strategies	Teacher without FL knowledge. Mainly L1 used.

Source: created by the authors for the purpose of this study.

Table 4 shows that the qualitative variables have a bearing on the quantitative results. As can be observed, the schools that had the most significant results were Las Trancas, Los Tallos and Lago Pellaifa. These schools have in common that their teachers do not have English knowledge, but they were partially or systematically using ImT. This indicates that the ICT resource in question is effective, in other words students learned English thanks to ImT since they received the greatest part of their linguistic input in the FL from the program’s characters.

The Las Trancas School deserves special attention. While the teachers of Los Tallos and Lago Pellaifa schools addressed students almost exclusively in Spanish, the teacher of Las Trancas School hardly spoke during the class, neither in the L1 nor the FL. This reinforces the hypothesis that ImT is effective since the input in English that students receive coming only from the program was followed by the observed differences between the input and output tests being greater. Nevertheless, the achievement could also be due to the fact that Las Trancas is a rural school where students come from indigenous families of Mapuche ethnicity—families whose L1 is Mapuzungun. Thus, these students cope with two languages, their L1 and Spanish as an L2, in addition to the FL with which they have contact in English class. Studies in bilingualism assert that students who speak in more than one language have a greater second language acquisition capacity (DE BOT; JAENSCH, 2015; GROSJEAN; LI, 2013).

The schools of San Marcos, El Rincón, and La Escondida obtained equally significant results. Their data deserves attention for two reasons. One point is that their teachers had a greater English skill level than that of the teachers at the other school, with communicative competence at the A2, B1, and B2 levels according to the European Reference Framework for Languages (CONSEJO DE EUROPA, 2002). The A2 level (elementary) permits the understanding and production of everyday life expressions of immediate relevance, related to personal and family information, commerce exchanges, and employment. This is the expected level for students who finish primary education in Chile. The B1 level (intermediate) prepares for understanding and producing typical ideas related to family, work, school, and leisure contexts. This is the expected level for students that finish Chilean secondary education. Finally, the B2 level (advanced intermediate), allows for the understanding and production of complex texts related to concrete or abstract topics, including technical discussions in a specialized area. This was the level required by the Ministry of Education until 2014, when the C1 level was added. The teachers at these three schools were able to communicate with their students in English, and therefore, it would be expected that the results would be higher in these institutions. The reality, which differed from this expectation, could be related to the management of the ICT tool. Indeed, La Escondida School sits one place above the bottom ranking and the teacher did not use ImT.

An additional striking feature is that the San Marcos School had twelve students in fifth and sixth grade, five of them with special educational needs (SEN). In this context, the teacher used mainly the FL. Generally, students with such needs do not participate in English class, instead using this time to reinforce other subject material; they are evaluated in a different way; or they are not evaluated at all. However, in this case they participated and were evaluated just as their seven other classmates were, and their achievement results were equally significant. This phenomenon opens the door to the study of the ICT tool implementation in contexts with students with special educational needs.

The fact that students learned English independently of their teachers’ language levels invites an additional consideration, that of ImT being responsible for the students’ learning observed in the study. This idea comes about because the additional input (KRASHEN, 1985) that they received in San Marcos, El Rincón and La Escondida schools from their teachers did not greatly affect their achievements. It has to be mentioned that the teacher in La Escondida School drew on a common practice used in English classes in Chile—the immediate translation of the FL to the L1. For example, he would say, “Open your book, boys,” immediately followed by, “Abran sus libros, chicos,” something that does not allow the students to make cognitive efforts and thus does not result in significant knowledge acquisition (SPITZER, 2013). It was found in the Lizasoain et al. study (2016) that this strategy is the most detrimental to English learning in Chile, even compared to when teachers use the L1 in class in greater proportion than the FL. Viewed in this light, it is understandable that this school’s achievement was lower than the five preceding schools in Table 4.

The Cui Cui School, the lowest in the ranking, must also be closely observed. Its performance seems similar to the first three schools: It’s my Turn is regularly used, the teacher possesses a low skill level in English, and the L1 is strongly present in the classroom. Nevertheless, the results are different: it is the only one that had a significant difference. Therefore, it is probable that there were other variables that have not been controlled in the study that would have contributed to a more precise interpretation of the data obtained.

The results from the input and output tests and the classroom observations made in the seven rural schools that participated in the study allow us to state that the ICT tool It’s my Turn, implemented by the Chilean government to bring rural students closer to the English language, is in fact effective; in other words, ImT contributes to an autonomous English teaching-learning (CLAVIJO; QUINTANA; QUINTERO, 2012; GARCÍA; FERREIRA; MORALES, 2012). That means that teachers who are not specialized can use it to teach English without necessarily having an adequate skill level to teach the language otherwise, which is was the Ministry of Education’s main goal in creating the tool (CHILE, 2017 b). Furthermore, students seem to be in benefit from this resource since in its absence it is probable that they would not have the opportunity to learn English.

This reality forces one to contemplate the teacher’s role in this particular context. We have said that the teacher is the main person responsible for learning; in fact, in the study that took place in the Metropolitan Region, ImT was proved to be a teaching tool like any other, and it was the teacher and his or her use of language that triggered learning. On the contrary, in the rural context of the RdlR, it could appear that this tool is more important than the teacher in reaching the goals in question. In the school with the highest achievements, the teacher almost didn’t intervene and left the tool to carry out the class. Similarly, in the rest of the schools, the achievements were related to the partial usage of ImT more than to the input of teachers, who generally used more L1 than FL. Thus, we can say that the teacher’s role is crucial in promoting learning when he or she is specialized in the area.

In spite of the achievements mentioned above, it is necessary to review the linguistic policies for communicative competence in English in rural areas, since the demonstrated performance is even lower. This is due not only to the educational realities of rural contexts, but also the national context—the standardized tests implemented twice a year in urban zones have consistently shown low proficiency levels that place Chile among the Latin American countries least literate in English (BRITISH COUNCIL, 2015; ENGLISH FIRST, 2017). These low results also relate to general educational measures. For example, while it is true that Chile has the highest place in Latin America on the PISA tests, it is also true that it scores well below in the average of the OECD countries, indicating low levels of reading comprehension and less developed mathematical abilities (OECD, 2016). The situation that produces such results necessarily affects foreign language development as well.

In this context, it might be asked whether it would be worth investing resources in improving the most important competences for the rural world, such as reading and writing in the mother tongue. Additionally, English learning could be contextualized in circumstances of the real rural life, as Méndez and Pérez (2015) have done, for example, to facilitate the rural tourism in Toledo, Spain. This inversion is not being suggested from the point of view of bringing together the rural and urban worlds, but in its own right, understanding that rural communities “must tackle meanings, considering rural areas valuable and important per se” (ROBERTS; CUERVO, 2015, p. 1).

In either case, it must be recognized that the urban and the rural work differently. According to this, if we compare the results of the Región de los Rios with the Metropolitan Region (see Table 5), it is evident that It’s my Turn was more effective in the Metropolitan Region, since the difference between the means of the input and output tests is greater in this region.

Table 5
Results Región de los Ríos and Metropolitan area.

Test	RdelR	RM
X Input	3.47	2.78
X Output	3.84	3.43
	0.37	0.65
P	< 0.0001	< 0.0001

Source: created by the authors for this study’s purposes

This is probably because in the RM the participant teachers were specialized, which means that they were not only skilled in the language, but they were also using specialized teaching methods. Nevertheless, attention is drawn to the initial results, which were higher in RdlR. This can be explained due to the nature of the multi-grade class: various levels can be found, and many students could have been exposed to the tool and/or to English for more than a year. In the case of RM, most of the students started studying English the year that the tests were implemented (LIZASOAIN et al., 2016).

In closing, even though we have claimed that the usage of It’s my Turn is fruitful in a rural context where many students would not otherwise have had access to English, by writing this conclusion we have also proposed that the program would be effective not only because it is an ICT tool, but also because it represents a learning material that did not exist before in class. In fact, the study of Lizasoain and Becchi (2014) shows that the students of RdlR were not so rural from an ICT access point of view: they had daily access to television and cellphones, and some had access to computers. In this sense, rural students of this region, as well as those of other rural areas in Chile and worldwide, might not need to be literate in ICT, but rather to be capable and to understand knowledge as a subject of negotiation through this type of platform. In this sense, the rural world does not seem disadvantaged, but different, and as such, ICT can contribute not to bridging the gap between the rural and urban worlds in order to facilitate individual development and acquiring the means to be and act as a modern person (CASTELLS, 1997), but rather to presenting new ways of learning that allow nations’ global development with a view of better life conditions (MEERA, 2012).

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• 1
  - This work reveals the results of an investigation financed by the Nacional Council of Education of Chile in 2013 and 2014, call for projects CNED 2013.
• 4
  - Two of the creators of It’s my Turn were members of the team. That means that the program could be perfectly understood.The Ministry of Education does not have the information related to the creators, the theoretical-methodological basis, the creation process, etc.
• 5
  - Teacher training is permitted when there is lack of specialized teachers. It can be authorized by the provincial department of education. The certificates are obtained after a basic specialized training by the Ministry of Education.
• 6
  - The students with special educational needs are members of the State’s School Integration Program (PIE). The teaching material gets adapted and its contents are evaluated on a different form. Only the San Marcos school had students that had been diagnosed with special needs (five to twelve).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  2018

History

• Received
  02 Aug 2016
• Accepted
  04 Apr 2017