Urgent, but How? Developing English Foreign Language Teachers' Digital Literacy in a Professional Learning Community Focusing on Large Language Models

ABSTRACT With the advent of chatGPT, burgeoning research have been conducted to explore AI technologies' impact on the EFL teaching and learning. However, little is known about how language teachers navigate the shifting education landscape and develop the digital literacy in the AI era. This preliminary qualitative study aims to investigate the processes of how 9 Chinese EFL teachers in a university‐based professional learning community improve their digital literacy, and reveal the factors influencing their digital literacy improvement. To achieve the research objectives, triangle data have been collected including the community meeting records, interviews of participants, class observations, and the participants' reflective journals. In the data analysis section, thematic analysis method has been employed. The findings indicate three distinct types of digital literacy improving processes for the novice teachers, the veteran teachers, and the lead teachers in the heterogeneous and interactive community. Meanwhile, these processes were influenced by the community factors such as artefacts, mediated activities, and social interactions, and the individual factors such as years of teaching experience, teaching subjects, teachers' belief about AI, teachers' theoretical base and research experience. Accordingly, implications are presented to EFL teachers, teacher educators and administrators.