Turkey's Ministry of Education emergency management policy in the COVID-19 outbreak: EFL teachers' digital literacy and consistency of distance online education process

The global overspread of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused pivotal changes in all spheres of life, including education systems that resulted in universal school closures from K-12 to tertiary level. The pandemic is broadly progressing on attending and running the education systems' outputs that some of them might already be damaged in several aspects. The outbreak has affected millions of students, which the learning gap among them has widened because of the swift shift from traditional learning to online distance learning. Neither teachers nor students were ready for digital education due to inadequate time to plan and precise information. Within the given context, the primary purpose of the current study is to investigate the digital literacy of Turkish EFL teachers and their experiences in using digital tools, particularly the EIN (Educational Informatics Network) platform, which is the national educational website in Turkey, the availability of online material, the efficacy of online assessment and feedback, and how teacher-student interaction occurred during the process in English classes at state schools. The study is adopted a mixed research design. The participants of the quantitative data, which was gathered through an online Likert-scale questionnaire, were 121 EFL teachers of MoNE (Ministry of National Education) who work in Kahramanmaraş, and qualitative data were obtained through online semi-structured interviews with 12 EFL teachers. It was investigated the practices, challenges, and strengths of distance online education and the efficacy and feasibility of online teaching. The data obtained for this aim were analyzed through SPSS 25.0 and thematic analysis. The findings indicate that EFL teachers felt competent in integrating digital tools into teaching; the internet connection problems were challenging during the live-streamed classes, and the EIN platform was a good component of instruction during the COVID-19 disease outbreak. This study presents significant implications for the future inquiry of EFL teaching and curriculum. Keywords: COVID-19 effects on education, digital literacy of EFL teachers, distance online language education, live-streamed lessons, digital assessment, and feedback