The Effect of Chinese EFL Students' Digital Literacy on Their Technostress and Academic Productivity

The importance of integrating technologies into second/foreign language (L2) education has garnered increasing attention among scholars in the past decade. It has been exponentially highlighted that L2 educators need to become digitally literate to succeed in the digital world. However, research on the contribution of English as a foreign language (EFL) students' digital literacy to their level of technostress and academic productivity has been left uncharted. To bridge the gap, this study used a quantitative research design via three validated questionnaires to examine whether Chinese EFL students' digital literacy affects their technostress and academic productivity. To this end, a sample of 426 EFL students were invited to fill in an electronic survey. The results of this study, as obtained by structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple regression, illustrated that EFL students' digital literacy influenced both their technostress and academic productivity. It was also shown that digital literacy could respectively predict 77% and 61% of changes in students' technostress and academic productivity. The study explains the results' implications for EFL educators and policy-makers, who can make more efforts to integrate technologies into L2 education. Finally, the limitations and future lines of research are presented.