Determining the role of digital literacy in EFL teaching in regard to the views of Turkish EFL teachers

Digital technologies facilitate interaction with individuals, family, and friends continuously, due to the busy barriers nowadays, individuals can not communicate directly and meet each other. Therefore, digital literacy (DL) is considered as one of the fundamental abilities in the 21st century and in this modern era for working as well as living properly. Since the influence and implementation of novel digital tools are shifting the education system rapidly and continuously, so it has opened a new gate for teachers to overcome the complexities and achieve efficient results in their instruction. Accordingly, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers have a very essential role in this digital world and they are required to have enough competence in utilizing kinds of current digital tools related to their instruction. So, the utilization of digital technology is a capability that must be obtained, maintained, and improved constantly by individuals and mainly EFL teachers. With the significance of this issue, this study aimed to be conducted through qualitative research and focus group discussion (FGD) collecting data tools, to determine the role of digital literacy in EFL teaching in regard to the views of Turkish EFL teachers. In line with the aim of this study, the research questions are the following: 1. What does digital literacy mean to (secondary & high) school EFL teachers? 2. How does the digital literacy level of (secondary & high) school EFL teachers affect their teaching? 3. What are the facilities of using digital tools in (secondary & high) school level of EFL teaching? 4. What are the challenges of using digital tools in (secondary & high) school level of EFL teaching? The present study was conducted with 18 EFL teachers that they participated voluntarily, (9 from secondary and 9 from high) school worked at different state schools in Elazığ. They were selected randomly to meet the trustworthiness of the study. Accordingly, Nvivo 12 software was used to analyse the data. The obtained results indicated noteworthy information about secondary and high school Turkish EFL teachers. For the first research question, both groups of participating teachers defined digital literacy as their different points of view. Related to the operational definition which was the study's model it was found that although they were sufficient of using digital devices, however, some of them did not have enough information about professional digital literacy. The second research question proved that the level of secondary school (SS) teachers were higher than the high school (HS) teachers one of the possible satisfactory explanations of the HS teachers that they did not feel competent enough was due to the ever-changing technologies of nowadays. Findings for the third and the fourth research questions noted that even though digital tools facilitate EFL teaching in some ways as the teachers confirmed, they faced many challenges while using digital tools in their instruction. Finally, based on the results of the current study some recommendations are given.