Discursive Constructions of Digital Artifacts by Primary School Teachers of English

Abstract

Abstract This article introduces and discusses a study that aims at shedding light upon discursive constructions of digital artifacts found in academic writing by primary school teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The study involved a group of primary school EFL teachers (further – participants), who were requested to write a series of academic essays on the topics in EFL didactics that focused on English grammar and/or phonetics and children’s literature in English. The corpus of the participants’ essays was examined for the presence of explicit references to digital artifacts. The results of the quantitative analysis of the corpus revealed that whilst the participants referred to YouTube as a digital artifact that they used in their teaching of English grammar and/or phonetics, they employed SmartBoard-related digital artifacts in order to teach aspects of children’s literature in English. These findings were further presented and discussed in the article.