The role of 21-century digital competence in shaping pre-service language teachers’ 21-century digital skills: the Partial Least Square Modeling Approach (PLS-SEM)

Due to the ongoing development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and shifting teaching with ICT to solving with it, teachers are required to possess competencies and transfer them to skills that transcend beyond basic ICT literacy, competence, and skills, namely twenty-first century digital competence and twenty-first century digital skills. To achieve this objective, this study situates pre-service English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ twenty-first century digital competence within a Digital Global Competence (DIGIGLO) framework. Thus, 472 Iranian pre-service teachers participated and responded to our study questionnaires. On the basis of results from the reflective model, the eight areas of the DIGIGLO framework were validated in the Iranian EFL context. Furthermore, the formative model showed that there were only four areas of DIGIGLO incorporating professional engagement, empowering learners, learning and teaching, and digital environment-shaped EFL teachers’ twenty-first century digital skills to identify suitable ICT tools to design, edit, present, and solve language learners’ problems while learning language through ICTs. Furthermore, these four areas shaped EFL pre-service teachers to acquire critical-thinking digital skills, enabling them to collect learners’ input to tailor their use of ICTs to benefit their learners’ needs. These findings suggest that in order to meet the demands of twenty-first century education, teachers need to develop competencies appropriate to the educational needs of the current post-modern era. The people who are responsible for hiring instructors and conducting teacher training programs for pre-service teachers should also consider DIGIGLO as a metric when hiring instructors or facilitating workshops for pre-service and in-service teachers to develop their digital competencies and skills in the twenty-first century.