English Teachers’ Perceptions of Essential Digital Literacy Skills and Implementation Challenges in Indonesian EFL Classrooms

Abstract

Digital literacy has become a core condition of English language teaching (ELT) because teachers and students increasingly work with online information, multimodal media, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence. This study investigated the digital literacy skills that senior high school English teachers considered essential for supporting ELT and the challenges they encountered when employing those skills. A descriptive qualitative design was used with ten purposively selected English teachers from senior high schools in Jakarta. Data were generated through 19-question semi-structured interviews conducted online and face to face and analyzed thematically with ATLAS.ti supporting coding and data management. The analysis used Trilling and Fadel’s information, media, and technology literacy domains. Information literacy accounted for the largest share of coded responses (45.80%), followed by media literacy (27.54%) and technology literacy (26.67%). Teachers described information literacy as the basis for finding, checking, adapting, organizing, and ethically using digital resources; media literacy supported interpretation and multimodal design; and technology literacy enabled research, communication, collaboration, assessment, and content production. Four interrelated challenges were identified: limited access and infrastructure, insufficient training and uneven teacher competence, institutional and contextual barriers, and student-related and pedagogical issues. Effective digital literacy integration therefore depends on critical judgment, pedagogically aligned technology use, sustained professional learning, equitable access, and institutional support rather than devices alone.