A Study Of Information Literacy Of English Teachers In Rural Junior High Schools

In an age of information technology,the advanced information technology has brought new opportunities and challenges for the reform and development of education.The development of education informatization necessitates the integration of information technology and English teaching.Information literacy has become one of teachers' fundamental literacy,which is a multifaceted concept,covering consciousness,competence,knowledge and ethics to solve practical problems in the information society.Many researchers have made abundant achievements about this topic.However,most of the research subjects are college teachers and senior high school teachers of different disciplines.There are few studies on English teachers in junior high schools,even fewer studies on English teachers in rural junior high schools.In addition,the difficulties encountered in the improvement of teachers' information literacy have seldom been studied.Therefore,this study investigates the current situation of information literacy of junior high school English teachers in Changyi County,hoping to put forward some effective measures.This study attempts to discuss the overall current situation of information literacy of junior high school English teachers in Changyi county;the influencing factors in information literacy improvement of junior high school English teachers and expected measures for information literacy improvement of junior middle school English teachers in this area.This study adopts qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate and analyze the information literacy of rural junior high school English teachers in Changyi County by means of questionnaires and interviews.The participants involved in this study are 55 English teachers from four junior high schools of Changyi County.The questionnaire in this study is based on the questionnaire of teachers' information literacy of Zhao Jingwen and some necessary adjustments are made.Based on the data analysis of the questionnaires and interviews,several majorfindings are revealed from the present study.Firstly,among the fundamental information literacy of teachers,English teachers in rural junior high schools have acquired some basic knowledge and skills in information technology,but in terms of information literacy,the overall situation is far from satisfactory.Meanwhile,the overall situation of teachers' vocational information literacy is relatively weak,especially the application of information technology in English learning.Secondly,according to the collected information and data analysis,the difficulties that rural junior high school English teachers encountered in the information literacy improvement include the inadequate emphasis of the school leaders,ineffective training programs,the imperfect evaluation system and the lagging educational concept of both school leaders and English teachers.Finally,according to the difficulties encountered and answers from the interview.The expected measures are discussed from six aspects,including improving information literacy consciousness,optimizing the content and mode of information literacy training,making good use of the existing resource,establishing reasonable incentive mechanism and management system to motivate teachers' learning enthusiasm,building an information technology team of English and integrating technology training with teaching practice.