Digital Literacy as Epistemic Practice in Indonesian EFL Academic Writing

Abstract

Digital tools are now routine in university writing, yet access to applications does not by itself produce the critical, ethical, and rhetorical judgement required for academic communication. This qualitative study examined how lecturers and students at an Indonesian university understood and enacted a digital-literacy-oriented approach to English as a foreign language academic writing. An ethnographically informed case design drew on the accounts of 40 students and three lecturers, participant observation, field notes, and contextual materials. Data were interpreted through inductive reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes were developed: a movement from operational convenience towards epistemic judgement; digital platforms as infrastructures for iterative writing and feedback; unequal participation shaped by connectivity, tool fluency, and source-evaluation capacity; and the need to align responsive classroom scaffolding with institutional support. Lecturers emphasised source credibility, citation, and integrity, whereas students initially foregrounded speed, access, and textual organisation. Shared documents, learning-management systems, reference tools, and similarity reports became pedagogically valuable when embedded in explicit comparison, feedback, and revision routines. The study proposes a Situated Digital Academic Writing model that connects epistemic information practices with iterative writing and identifies the contextual conditions that enable participation. Because the evidence is qualitative and perception-based, it does not establish causal improvement in writing achievement. The findings instead show how digital literacy can be designed as a situated academic practice rather than reduced to technical tool use.