An Investigation Of The Use Of Information Literacy Strategies By EFL Learners

Nowadays, with the exponential growth of information and the emergence of Internet, people are always surrounded by a growing ocean o f information in all formats. As a result, information literacy(IL), the ability to locate and identify information that can be effectively used to solve an issue or problem, has become an important requirement for many careers. To empirically investigate information literacy, Eagleton and Dobler(2007) proposed a framework called the QUEST model to analyze the five stages of information processing on the Internet, namely Questioning, Understanding, Evaluating, Synthesizing and Transforming. Meanwhile, the Power Point slides, a widely used instrument to investigate learners’ IL, provide an ideal place for information from various sources to be put together.Based on the QUEST model, the current research aims to investigate the use of the information literacy strategies among EFL learners on the Internet. Specifically speaking, the study aims to answer the following three questions:1. Which IL strategies are used more frequently by EFL learners? Whichones are used less?2. Are there any correlations between using of IL strategies and their slidesscores? And in what aspects?3. What are the differences of using IL strategies between students withhigh and low slides scores?Fifty-seven university students were chosen as the subjects, who were asked to make the Power Point slides of at least nine pages on the topic of The Rising of the Sea Level within 150 minutes. Since the subjects are not familiar with the topic, they were required to use the Internet to locate, evaluate and synthesize the needed information. The Power Point slides were scored based on an assessment rubric constructed according to the ―performance assessment‖(Kalanztis et al. 2003). It contains four parts, namely completion, language, content and organization. Each part is rated ―low- 1 point‖, ―medium- 2 points‖, and ―high- 3 points‖, making the total score ranging from 4 to 12. In addition, based on the QUEST model, a questionnaire was also developed to investigate the use of information literacy strategies among the subjects.The data for statistical analysis were collected in four steps. First, the abilities of participants’ information literacy were measured by their slides scores. Second, the use of different information literacy strategies was collected by a questionnaire which was adapted by the QUEST model. Third, the desktop activities of searching information on the Internet and writing the Power Point slides were monitored by the software called My Screen Recorder. Fourth, interviews were carried out after participants completed the questio nnaires to understand their considerations when writing the Power Point slides. Finally, SPSS 20.0 was applied to analyze the data through descriptive statistics, Pearson product- moment correlation and one-way ANOVA.As for research question one, the findings of the study indicate that EFL learners employed all the five information literacy strategies during the process of locating, evaluating and utilizing information. More specifically, EFL learners used Questioning and Evaluating strategies more frequently, whereas Transforming strategy was less frequently used. Second, the use of information literacy strategies by subjects is not significantly correlated with the total score of the Power Point slides task. However, significant correlations could be found when the use of strategies was related to the sub-scores of the Power Point slides task. In detail, using the strategy of Evaluating and the sub-strategy of evaluating URLs relates to language scores, using the strategy of Evaluating, and the sub-strategies of clicking an appropriate website by deliberate choice and citing sources relates to content scores, and using the sub-strategy of matching multiple resources with the research questions relates to organization scores. Last, students with high and low total scores did not show significant differences in the use of the five strategies. However, there were some differences of strategies uses when we divided the students according to their scores on completion, language, content and organization. Using the strategy of Evaluating, and the sub-strategies of asking questions during searching, interpreting URLs and domain names, clicking an appropriate website by deliberate choice, evaluating URLs, switching topics, visiting new websites, trying new keywords and changing search engines will have a significant difference in their language scores. There are also salient differences lie in using of sub-strategies of interpreting URLs and domain names and citing sources in their content scores. Using the sub-strategies of matching multiple resources with the research questions and managing computers will make great differences in their organization scores.The significance of the research lies in that it provides us with a better understanding of the nature of information literacy and points out further directions for the teaching of information literacy among Chinese English learners.