DIGITAL LITERACY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE SKILLS AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN UZBEKISTAN: A PRISMA-GUIDED SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Digital literacy has become a core competence for university students learning English in technology-rich environments. It includes not only the technical ability to operate digital tools but also the capacity to locate, evaluate, create, communicate, and use information critically and responsibly. This PRISMA-guided systematic review synthesizes international and Uzbekistan-specific evidence on how digital literacy contributes to the development of English language skills among university students. The review focuses on reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, communicative competence, learner autonomy, and online learning capacity. Evidence from systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and empirical studies indicates that digital literacy can support language learning by improving access to authentic resources, critical information evaluation, multimodal comprehension, digital communication, content creation, feedback use, and self-regulated learning. Recent meta-analytic evidence also links digital literacy to academic achievement more broadly. In English as a foreign language contexts, digital competence interacts with students’ approaches to learning and may be weakened by technostress, unequal access, low information-evaluation skills, and insufficient pedagogical support. Emerging evidence from Uzbekistan points in the same general direction but remains limited in scale and methodological strength. The review concludes that digital literacy should be treated as an integrated language-learning competence rather than a separate technical skill and recommends its systematic incorporation into university English curricula in Uzbekistan.