International Open Access Journal Platform

1 Introduction

Emerging technologies — generative artificial intelligence (AI) in particular — are driving changes in education on an unprecedented scale, and the reshaping of the educational ecosystem in the intelligent era is already underway (Wu & Liu, 2026). Both the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee have clearly set forth the direction of advancing the digitalization of education and harnessing it to support the construction of a learning society. This not only reveals the core position of the digitalization strategy in the process of building a leading country in education but also presents new challenges to the professional competence of teachers — the principal agents of educational practice. In January 2025, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the Outline of the Plan for Building China into a Leading Country in Education (2024-2035), emphasizing the need to “develop and improve digital literacy standards for teachers and students, and deepen the AI-empowered development of the teaching force” (CPC Central Committee & State Council, 2025). In this context, teachers’ digital literacy has gone from being an extra skill to a key factor that shapes how far educational transformation can reach-especially with generative AI progressing fast and reshaping the forms of subject teaching (Yang, 2025), a shift that raises the bar for digital literacy to cover dimensions like human-machine collaboration and data-driven decision-making; scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to this issue, and the body of research has grown richer, with deep dives into the definition (Wu & Gui, 2023), framework (Zheng et al., 2021), and assessment system (Zhu & Zhang et al., 2024) of teachers’ digital literacy, which together have laid a fairly solid theoretical foundation.

However, a review of the existing literature reveals that there is still room for expansion in current research. On the one hand, empirical studies on teachers’ digital literacy situated within specific subject teaching contexts (e.g., English) remain insufficient. On the other hand, with regard to the special educational field of border ethnic minority regions — especially under the background of deep AI integration into education — there is still a lack of sufficient theoretical support and data evidence for systematically diagnosing the current state of secondary school English teachers’ digital literacy and constructing regionally adaptive, differentiated improvement strategies. In view of this, the present study is grounded in the dual contexts of the digitalization strategy and the construction of a leading country in education, focuses on the educational field of border ethnic minority regions, and adopts empirical research methods to systematically diagnose the digital literacy levels of secondary school English teachers. By taking a close, multidimensional look, this study sets out to carve differentiated improvement pathways that truly respond to regional particularities. The whole effort is geared toward pushing educational modernization forward through teachers’ digital transformation, while also building the theoretical grounding and practical models needed to advance equitable and quality education in border ethnic minority regions.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Definitions of Digital Literacy at Home and Abroad

The way we understand digital literacy has kept evolving right alongside advances in digital technologies. As early as 1997, Paul Gilster described it as “the ability to access networked computer resources and use them” (Gilster, 1997). This initial conceptualization focused primarily on the basics of operating digital tools, and it set the stage for a lot of the research that came after. By 2004, Israeli scholar Eshet-Alkalai took the idea further and proposed a multi-dimensional digital literacy framework that brought together several distinct abilities: photo-visual literacy (reading and interpreting visuals), reproduction literacy (creatively recombining existing materials), branching literacy (handling multiple, non-linear information paths), information literacy (finding and evaluating information), and socio-emotional literacy (collaborating and behaving ethically in digital spaces) (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004). What this framework did was move well beyond treating digital literacy as a single, narrow skill. Instead, it highlighted just how many layers and dimensions real digital competence involves, and comprises a complex constellation of interrelated abilities.

Looking at it from a more practical, real-world standpoint, the European Union’s DigComp project defines digital competence as “the confident, critical and responsible use of digital technologies to participate in learning, work, and social activities”. Its model organizes everything into five key areas: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, and problem solving (Van Audenhove et al., 2024). The emphasis here is very much on how digital technologies get applied in actual, everyday situations — whether someone is learning, on the job, or taking part in society. When it comes to the teaching profession in particular, the Norwegian Centre for ICT in Education (NCIE) put forward a more tightly focused framework in 2017. Instead of treating teachers’ digital literacy as a single broad idea, they broke it down into seven distinct domains: subjects and basic skills, the school’s role in society, ethics, pedagogy and subject-specific pedagogy, leadership of learning processes, interaction and communication, and change and development (The Norwegian Centre for ICT in Education, 2017). That framework highlights the full range of professional roles and responsibilities that teachers carry in a digital age. It emphasizes that teachers’ digital competence extends far beyond the mere use of technology to encompass how they lead learning, engage with the wider society, handle ethical challenges, and continue growing as professionals in a world constantly being reshaped by digital tools. UNESCO’s 2018 framework, focusing on the educational context, identifies six domains for teachers’ ICT competencies: Understanding ICT in education, curriculum and assessment, pedagogy, application of digital skills, organization and administration, and teacher professional learning (UNESCO, 2018), which is more closely aligned with the needs of educational practice.

In China, although attention to digital literacy started somewhat later, it has developed rapidly. In 2021, the Action Plan for Enhancing Digital Literacy and Skills for All issued by the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission defined digital literacy and skills for the first time at the national level as “the set of qualities and abilities that citizens in a digital society should possess in learning, work, and daily life, including digital acquisition, production, use, evaluation, interaction, sharing, innovation, security assurance, and ethics” (Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, 2021), covering the basic needs of all citizens in the digital era. For the teaching profession, the Ministry of Education’s 2022 draft of Digital Literacy for Teachers provided a more specific definition: “the awareness, abilities, and responsibilities of teachers to appropriately use digital technologies to acquire, process, use, manage, and evaluate digital information and resources, to discover, analyze, and solve educational and teaching problems, and to optimize, innovate, and transform educational and teaching activities” (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2022). What this definition stresses isn’t just the tool-like side of digital technologies — it also highlights the initiative and creativity teachers bring when they use those technologies in educational settings. The present study takes this definition as its core theoretical framework to examine the current digital literacy status of secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions.

2.2 Recent Research on Teachers’ Digital Literacy in China

Over the years, researchers have kept probing the conceptual framework of teachers’ digital literacy. The Digital Literacy for Teachers standard, rolled out by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China in 2022, explicitly laid out five core dimensions: digital awareness, knowledge and skills, application abilities, social responsibility, and professional development. Chen et al. (2025) then did a comparative analysis of nine teacher digital literacy frameworks, both from China and abroad, and what they found was that these frameworks tend to overlap on multiple dimensions — things like digital application skills and teacher professional development get emphasized across the board.

But the reality is, there’s a pretty big gap between what these standards and frameworks describe as the ideal and what actually happens in practice. Lin et al. (2025), drawing on surveys carried out in the Pearl River Delta and a few other regions, found that while teachers’ overall digital literacy reached a moderate level, the “digital application” dimension came in with the lowest scores. This highlights the practical challenge of seamlessly integrating technology into daily teaching. And this gap gets even more complicated and striking in border ethnic minority regions. Zheng and Xue (2025) looked into rural teachers in S County, Shaanxi Province, and identified a digital literacy divide that they broke down into four parts: first, a “resource gap” driven by unequal resource distribution; second, an “awareness gap” coming from a lag in understanding digital technology; third, a “skill gap” rooted in weak digital application capabilities; and fourth, an “information gap” caused by poor resource-sharing mechanisms. On top of that, years of teaching experience also shape literacy levels in a big way. Research from Guangxi shows that teachers’ overall digital literacy tends to slide as their years of experience go up, with those who’ve taught for over 20 years generally scoring lower across all five dimensions (Yuan & Liu, 2024).

To tackle these challenges, scholars have come up with a range of bridging pathways, each from a different perspective. Zheng and Xue (2025), for example, drew on Actor-Network Theory and traced the literacy gap back to a step-by-step process they called “role anomie-ecological rupture-synergy failure”; they pushed for systemic restoration by spelling out the roles of core actors, strengthening non-human actors like technological infrastructure, and building up network synergy. Liu Yanchun and Zhang Luyun (2025) looked at this from the angle of spatiotemporal sociology, arguing that the dilemma shows up as a triple hindrance — across material, spiritual, and social space — and they called for a “reconstruction” of the cultivation path by extending real spatiotemporal space, constructing virtual spatiotemporal space, and reshaping cognitive spatiotemporal space. Down at the level of specific mechanisms, Wu Xiangming et al. (2025), through empirical research, found that “behavioral practice” works as the direct channel for literacy generation and “multi-condition collaboration” acts as the key mechanism, stressing the need to boost self-efficacy, deepen school-enterprise training, and improve policy guarantees. Kou Wenliang and Hao Yuxuan (2026) zoomed in on endogenous motivation, suggesting that the way to “break through the cocoon” is to awaken teachers’ sense of autonomy, competence, and belonging, and to put together a long-term support system through policy precision, technological appropriateness, and ecological synergy. Li Yaling et al. (2025), focusing on county-level vocational school teachers, proposed setting up a school-based evaluation system, carrying out evidence-based, targeted training, and building a cross-domain digital teaching and research community so that resources can be shared through formats like “delivery classrooms”.

What’s missing, though, is that the existing literature has barely touched on the subject specificity of English teachers in border ethnic areas, and there aren’t many studies that really dig into the actual digital literacy situation of these teachers or the factors that shape it. Given where things stand now, this article sets out to take a comprehensive, in-depth look at the current digital literacy level of middle school English teachers in border ethnic areas, to explore how gender, ethnicity, years of teaching, and school type might influence its development, and to offer strategic suggestions for raising the digital literacy of middle school English teachers in these regions.

3 Research Design

3.1 Research Questions

The following research questions guide this study: (1) What is the current digital literacy landscape among secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions? (2) Do their digital literacy levels vary by gender, ethnicity, years of teaching experience, or school type?

3.2 Research Participants

The study employed a convenience sampling approach. Between March 26 and March 27, 2025, researchers distributed an online questionnaire to secondary school English teachers in the border ethnic minority regions of Guangxi, covering cities like Chongzuo, Fangchenggang, and Baise. The survey gathered 214 questionnaires; after removing responses that were completed in an implausibly short time (under 2 minutes) or exhibited clear patterned answering (e.g., identical responses across nearly all items), 211 valid questionnaires were retained, yielding a valid response rate of 98.60% (see Table 1).

Table 1 Sample Distribution Information

3.3 Research Instrument

This study used the Ministry of Education’s Digital Literacy for Teachers standard as the benchmark and drew on the assessment questionnaire developed by Peng Hongchao and Zhu Kaige (Peng & Zhu, 2024). A five-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree) was employed to measure. The scale was subsequently adapted, with its five dimensions specifically tailored to the context of secondary school English teaching in these areas (see Table 2): in the “Digital Awareness” dimension, seven core items were retained from the original scale and two new items were added (“I believe that digital technology can effectively support the cultivation of cross-cultural communication competence in English teaching” and “I agree that digital technology can alleviate the shortage of English teachers in border ethnic minority regions through approaches such as remote dual-teacher classrooms”), focusing on the cognition of integrating digital technology with ethnic minority education, yielding a total of nine items; in the “Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills” dimension, two basic items were retained from the original scale and two new items were added (“I am familiar with and able to operate digital tools specific to the English subject” and “I can proficiently use the functions of digital tools to support multilingual classroom teaching”), emphasizing the assessment of multilingual tool operation abilities, yielding a total of four items; in the “Digital Application” dimension, the original scale item of “modifying or creating digital educational resources” was refined into “modifying or creating English digital educational resources”; and in the “Digital Social Responsibility” dimension, particular attention was paid to the digital practice of ethnic cultural resources, while simultaneously incorporating cultural security requirements (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2024). The “Digital Application” (13 items), “Digital Social Responsibility” (6 items), and “Professional Development” (7 items) dimensions remained unchanged in terms of item count, with only minor adjustments to the wording of certain items.

Table 2 Questionnaire Dimensions and Item Structure

3.4 Data Analysis

This study performed data analysis using SPSS 25.0. In the data preprocessing stage, missing data were handled with the series mean method. Mplus 8.3 was employed to conduct confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. A descriptive statistical analysis framework was constructed to systematically characterize the overall features of teachers’ digital literacy and to accurately measure the central tendency and dispersion of each dimension’s indicators. Independent-samples t-tests were employed to systematically examine the mean differences in teachers’ digital literacy associated with the binary variables of gender, ethnicity, and school type. Furthermore, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was adopted to analyze the effect of the categorical variable of years of teaching experience segments on teachers’ digital literacy. Reliability was examined at the dimension level. The five dimensions’ Cronbach’s α values, reported in Table 2, averaged 0.913, pointing to satisfactory internal consistency across the instrument. In terms of validity, the KMO value was 0.946, and the data passed Bartlett’s test of sphericity (p < 0.05), suggesting that the research data were suitable for factor analysis. When performing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using Mplus, the comparative fit index (CFI) and the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) were 0.856 and 0.845, respectively. Due to issues such as sample size, an excessive number of model dimensions and items, and overly broad coverage, it is generally considered acceptable for indices such as TLI and CFI to be slightly below 0.9 (above 0.8) (Yan et al., 2018). The RMSEA value was 0.095 (less than 0.10), indicating that the model error fell within an acceptable critical range. The SRMR value was 0.106, slightly above the 0.10 threshold; however, given that the other fit indices were within acceptable ranges and the scale demonstrated strong reliability and exploratory factor analysis results, the model was deemed acceptable for the purposes of this study.

Given the content heterogeneity of items within each dimension, item-level one-way ANOVA was conducted on all 40 items in addition to descriptive comparisons at the dimension level. This approach was adopted to more precisely identify the specific aspects of digital literacy on which years of teaching experience exerted an influence.

3.5 Ethical Considerations

Data were collected anonymously via the online survey platform Wenjuanxing. Prior to participation, all respondents were informed of the study’s purpose, assured of the anonymity and confidentiality of their responses, and notified that participation was entirely voluntary.

4 Research Findings

4.1 The Overall Current State of Digital Literacy among Secondary School English Teachers in Border Ethnic Minority Regions

What the questionnaire data brought to light was that secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions have reached an overall medium-to-high level of digital literacy, with the “Digital Awareness” dimension (M = 4.346, SD = 0.768) and the “Digital Social Responsibility” dimension (M = 4.431, SD = 0.754) both landing mean scores above 4.3, putting them squarely in the high range; among all dimensions, “Digital Social Responsibility” showed the smallest standard deviation (SD = 0.754), indicating that teachers’ responses on this dimension were particularly concentrated. Paired with the high mean (M = 4.431), this pattern suggests a broadly shared positive stance toward the ethical and social responsibilities entailed by digital technology use in their teaching contexts, while the high mean for “Digital Awareness” captured a broad recognition of the value digital technology holds for weaving ethnic cultural heritage into English language teaching. “Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills” (M = 3.397) stood out as a relative weakness and also produced the biggest standard deviation (SD = 1.114), hinting at sizable individual gaps in terms of technical proficiency, and the “Professional Development” dimension averaged 3.924 (SD = 0.861), pointing to a clear understanding among teachers that boosting digital literacy matters, yet actual involvement with systematic development paths still had some catching up to do (see Table 3).

Table 3 Overview of Teachers’ Digital Literacy (N = 211)

4.2 Comparison of Digital Literacy Differences among Secondary School English Teachers in Border Ethnic Minority Regions Based on Demographic Characteristics

4.2.1 Gender Differences

Table 4 presents the results of the gender difference analysis for the digital literacy of secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions. The statistical inference results based on the independent-samples t-test showed that no statistically significant differences (p > 0.05) were observed in the score distributions across the five dimensions of digital literacy between teachers of different genders, indicating that the gender variable did not exert a substantial influence on the development of any dimension of digital literacy.

Table 4 Independent-Samples T-Test Based on Gender

Note: p < 0.05 (the same below).

4.2.2 Ethnic Differences

This study conducted a comparative analysis of the performance of Han Chinese and ethnic minority teachers in the digital domain (see Table 5). None of the five digital literacy dimensions showed a statistically significant difference between Han Chinese and ethnic minority teachers. When the analysis moved to the individual items within the Digital Awareness dimension, one statement did stand out: “I believe digital technology can help ease the shortage of English teachers in border ethnic minority regions.” This item showed a statistically significant difference (t = −2.107, p = 0.036), with ethnic minority teachers having a mean score of 4.17, higher than the mean score of 3.84 for Han Chinese teachers, suggesting that ethnic minority teachers are more inclined to believe that digital technology can alleviate the shortage of English teachers in border ethnic minority regions. For the other four dimensions, no statistically significant differences were found between Han Chinese and ethnic minority teachers. Overall, the performance of Han Chinese and ethnic minority teachers converged across most digital literacy dimensions; however, ethnic differences existed in certain aspects of Digital Awareness.

Table 5 Independent-Samples Test Based on Ethnicity

4.2.3 Years of Teaching Experience Differences

The dimension-level mean scores across the four teaching experience groups are presented in Table 6. Scores on Digital Awareness and Digital Social Responsibility were relatively similar across groups, whereas scores on Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills, Digital Application, and Professional Development showed a general downward trend with increasing years of teaching experience.

Table 6 One-Way ANOVA of Years of Teaching Experience (Overall Dimensions) 

Note: Values are dimension-level means of all items within each dimension.

Dimension-level means, however, can mask quite different patterns that show up at the item level. Given that items inside the same dimension range from broad beliefs about technology to very concrete operational and application behaviors, teachers who differ in years of experience may respond to these items in opposite directions, potentially neutralizing the differences when aggregated at the dimension level; to track down exactly where teaching-experience effects are coming from, item-level one-way ANOVAs were run on all 40 items.

What the item-level analyses turned up was that more than half of the 40 items showed significant differences across teaching-experience groups (p < 0.05), and the direction of these differences stayed remarkably consistent — the 0–5 year group posted the highest scores, the ≥16 year group the lowest, and the 6–10 and 11–15 year groups sat in between. These 20 items clustered mostly within the Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills and Digital Application dimensions, with a few also landing in Professional Development, while, by sharp contrast, none of the items in the Digital Awareness or Digital Social Responsibility dimensions showed any significant variation linked to years of teaching experience. Looking at what the items actually measure, those with significant differences can be sorted into three categories.

The first category has to do with technical operation and practical skills. Some representative items here are “I am able to promptly resolve any malfunctions of digital devices, software, or platforms that arise during teaching” (F (3, 207) = 7.822, p < 0.001), “I am familiar with and able to operate digital tools specific to the English subject” (F (3, 207) = 12.584, p < 0.001), and “I can proficiently use the functions of digital tools to support multilingual classroom teaching” (F (3, 207) = 9.365, p < 0.001).

On these items, teachers with 0–5 years of experience averaged above 3.70, whereas those with 16 years or more scored below 3.00 — the scale’s neutral midpoint, indicating that, on average, the most experienced teachers did not endorse these technology operation items as part of their skill set. The second category covered digital teaching applications and interaction, with representative items like “I can use online platforms to build an environment where students are able to join in on classroom learning remotely” (F (3, 207) = 10.605, p < 0.001), “I can run activities like knowledge quizzes on digital devices to get students more involved” (F (3, 207) = 11.830, p <0.001), and “I can use the data that comes back from digital devices and platforms to adjust my teaching strategies and activities” (F (3, 207) = 8.701, p < 0.001); for these, the mean differences between the 0–5 years and ≥16 years groups typically topped 0.7 points. The third category dealt with digital professional development behaviors, including items such as “I make a point of using digital devices to keep building my own English subject knowledge and skills” (F (3, 207) = 3.715, p = 0.012), “I use the data digital devices give me to figure out how well my teaching objectives have been achieved” (F (3, 207) = 5.807, p = 0.001), and “I take part in online professional development activities — sharing experiences, exchanging ideas, and working through questions I meet” (F (3, 207) = 8.582, p < 0.001); here again, younger teachers tended to score higher, though the mean gaps were slightly smaller than those seen in the first two categories; Table 7 reports the ANOVA results for these representative items across the four teaching-experience groups.

Table 7 Comparison of Differences on Specific Items among Teachers with Different Years of Teaching Experience (N = 211)

Put simply, what the data suggest is that years of teaching experience shaped digital literacy mainly at the level of concrete technical operations, digital teaching applications, and professional development behaviors, not at the level of general cognition or attitudes. Younger teachers showed much stronger abilities than their more experienced colleagues in troubleshooting device malfunctions, operating specialized digital tools, facilitating digital interactions in class, and using digital resources for self-directed learning — pointing to a fairly clear capability gap. A likely reason for this gap is the mismatch between the pace of technological iteration and the professional development cycle: teachers with 0–5 years of experience, mostly at the career entry stage, lean heavily on systematic pre-service training and standardized early-career induction programs for their professional growth, making them more receptive to new technologies; in contrast, teachers with more than 11 years of experience have reached a career stability stage, relying more on their long-accumulated teaching experience and showing relatively lower sensitivity to shifts in the external technological environment.

4.3 Analysis of Structural Differences in Digital Literacy among Secondary School English Teachers in Border Ethnic Minority Regions from the Perspective of School Type

This study conducted a comparative analysis of the performance of different school types in the digital domain (see Table 8). Except for three items in the Digital Awareness dimension that showed statistically significant differences, no significant differences were found in the other four dimensions. Among the nine indicators of Digital Awareness, no significant differences (p > 0.05) were observed between samples from different school locations on six items concerning educational integration practices and teaching models, for example, “The future of education cannot be separated from digital technology”. In contrast, on the three items of macro-level or special-context cognition — namely the role of digital technology in economic competition, the intelligent development of education, and support for English teachers in border ethnic minority regions — the mean agreement scores of the county seat group (4.33, 4.58, 4.22) were all significantly higher than those of the township group (4.05, 4.34, 3.87). Overall, differences existed between samples from different locations in their cognition of the macro-level impact of digital technology, while their views converged on the specific practical aspects of educational integration. The mean scores of both county seat and township secondary school English teachers in Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills, Digital Application, and Professional Development were relatively low (M < 4.00).

Table 8 Independent-Samples Test Based on School Type

5 Discussion

The questionnaire data indicate that the digital literacy of secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions shows a structural pattern of awareness running ahead while practice lags behind, with overall literacy sitting at a medium-to-high level; when dimension mean scores are ranked from highest to lowest, the order goes: Digital Social Responsibility, Digital Awareness, Professional Development, Digital Application, and Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills, a finding that points to a shared recognition within the teacher group concerning the cultural sensitivity of digital technology use — they acknowledge technology’s empowering potential yet also stress the importance of maintaining cultural subjectivity, which aligns with Wang (2024)’s observation that teachers in ethnic minority areas hold certain advantages in the Digital Awareness and Digital Social Responsibility dimensions (Wang, 2024).

Further analysis reveals that the weaker parts of their digital literacy structure are concentrated in technical practice: the Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills dimension recorded not only the lowest mean but also the largest standard deviation, pointing to a clear capability gap among teachers when it comes to technology application, a result that supports the conclusion by Lin et al. (2025), drawn from surveys in the Pearl River Delta and other areas, that the Digital Application dimension scored the lowest, and that also echoes the “skill gap” concept advanced by Zheng and Xue (2025); while some younger teachers can skillfully weave digital tools into English teaching, those with more years behind them often remain at the stage of basic operation — a pattern consistent with Yuan and Liu (2024)’s finding that as teaching experience increases, teachers’ overall digital literacy tends to decline. Additionally, data from the Professional Development dimension uncover a gap between awareness and actual behavior: although teachers generally recognize the necessity of improving their digital literacy, their participation in school-based training and research and their engagement in ongoing technical training are still insufficient.

With regard to gender, the analysis found no differential effect on the digital literacy level of secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions. This result departs to some extent from earlier research. Xue and Zhang (2024) observed significant gender differences among rural teachers, with male teachers’ digital literacy markedly higher than that of female teachers (Xue & Zhang, 2024). On the other hand, studies by Liu (2024) and Yan et al. (2023) showed that female teachers came out significantly ahead of male teachers, both in overall digital literacy and across a number of dimensions, yet Huang and Wang (2024) turned up no statistically significant gap between the two, and the present study’s findings fall in line with the latter conclusion (Huang & Wang, 2024). What might account for this pattern is the inclusive development environment that’s been built up through the strong push, at both national and local levels, for education informatization policies in recent years — the Education Informatization 2.0 Action Plan, put out by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China back in 2018, explicitly made it a core task to markedly lift teachers’ information literacy and to get teachers actively adapting to informatization, with all-staff training as a key principle; carried along by policies like these, training programs at the national and regional scale have been rolled out widely across border ethnic minority regions, giving all teachers equal access to opportunities and resources and putting in place institutional safeguards to narrow the technology-application gap between regions.

In regard to the ethnic factor, the digital literacy of secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions is characterized by differentiation in Digital Awareness amid overall convergence. This study found that secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions scored relatively high in the dimensions of Digital Awareness and Digital Social Responsibility, but were relatively weak in Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills. This pattern is largely consistent with Li’s (2024) observation that teachers in ethnic minority regions tend to hold a narrow understanding of digital literacy, often reducing it to Digital Application, while grappling with considerable cognitive and practical challenges, yet it partially differs from the conclusion of Dai and Xu (2018) that teachers in ethnic minority areas face difficulties in all four aspects of information awareness, knowledge, ability, and ethics (Dai & Xu, 2018). Across most digital literacy dimensions, Han Chinese and ethnic minority teachers performed similarly, but certain aspects of Digital Awareness did reveal ethnic differences — specifically, ethnic minority teachers obtained significantly higher scores than Han Chinese on the perception that digital technology can help ease the shortage of English teachers in border ethnic minority regions, a finding that likely stems from ethnic minority teachers having long worked on the frontline of border education and directly faced practical issues like teacher shortages, thereby holding a sharper perception of digital technology’s potential to address teaching difficulties.

Regarding years of teaching experience, item-level analyses showed that teaching-experience differences were clustered in technical operation, digital teaching application, and professional development behaviors, rather than in general cognition or attitudes, and across the Digital Awareness and Digital Social Responsibility dimensions, no significant differences turned up among teaching experience groups on any item, while marked and consistent differences did appear on items linked to Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills, with teachers who had 0–5 years and 6–10 years of experience scoring significantly higher than those with over 11 years; likewise, in Digital Application, significant differences across groups emerged on multiple items concerning practical digital teaching operations, and in professional development, teachers with 0–5 years of experience significantly outperformed those with over 11 years — especially the subgroup with more than 16 years — in areas such as proactive learning and the analysis of teaching data feedback, a result that supports Yuan and Liu (2024)’s finding that teachers’ overall digital literacy tends to drop as years of teaching experience increase, with the root cause of this gap lying in the misalignment between the pace of technological iteration and the professional development cycle; as laid out in the 13th Five-Year Plan for National Education Development, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China stressed promoting educational modernization through education informatization and actively advancing the integrated and innovative development of information technology and education (State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2017), and teachers with 0–5 years of experience, most of whom are at the career entry stage, depend heavily on systematic pre-service training and standardized induction programs for professional growth, thus showing stronger receptivity to new technologies, whereas those with more than 11 years of experience have generally entered a career stability stage, relying more on their long-accumulated teaching experience and displaying relatively lower sensitivity to changes in the external technological environment.

With respect to the school type factor, this study found that county seat English teachers and township English teachers differed only in the Digital Awareness dimension, while no significant differences were observed in the other dimensions. This finding is not entirely consistent with the conclusion of Wang (2024) that the urban-rural gap is the most salient difference in teachers’ digital literacy in ethnic minority areas. In the Digital Awareness dimension, views concerning the deep transformation of education through technology received higher agreement in county seat schools, which is related to the advantages of such schools in accessing digital resources and participating in technical training; teachers there have a more profound experience of the systemic value of technology-empowered education. In contrast, for issues close to frontline teaching practice, no significant differences in agreement were found between urban and rural schools, reflecting the broad consensus that has formed around ideas directly related to classroom application, and this is closely connected with the widespread advancement of digital education practices in recent years (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2018).

6 Pathways for Enhancing the Digital Literacy of Secondary School English Teachers in Border Ethnic Minority Regions

Based on the research findings, the core contradictions in the digital literacy of secondary school English teachers in border ethnic minority regions are manifested in three main aspects. The competency structure shows a noticeable imbalance: scores in Digital Awareness and Digital Social Responsibility are comparatively higher, while more practical dimensions such as Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills and Digital Application tend to lag behind, giving rise to a clear knowing-doing gap. In terms of group-level development, significant disparities emerge — years of teaching experience produce highly significant differences specifically in Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills, Digital Application and Professional Development, which together create a capability gap between early-career and veteran teachers. The external support system also falls short; for example, township schools scored lower than county seat schools on certain Digital Awareness indicators, and location-based inequalities persist in the distribution of resources and professional development opportunities. In light of these problems, three enhancement pathways are outlined as follows.

6.1 Constructing a Targeted Training System Based on Years of Teaching Experience Stratification

The Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills dimension came out with the lowest mean and significant variation by years of teaching experience, and to tackle this, a differentiated training mechanism that fits the characteristics of different teaching experience bands is worth putting in place (Qiao et al., 2025; Xu et al., 2025). Teachers with 0–5 years of experience are in the career adaptation stage — they take to new technology quickly but are still building up teaching experience — so training for them should lean heavily on hands-on practice in weaving digital technology deeply into English teaching, covering things like operating intelligent grading systems, making digital courseware, and developing multimodal teaching resources, so their tech edge can be put to full use and they can serve as trailblazers in a school’s push toward digital teaching reform. For the 6–10 year cohort, who have already gathered a fair amount of teaching experience, the focus should shift toward building data-driven teaching decision-making skills, including running multidimensional analyses of student performance, using real-time classroom feedback tools, and carrying out data-based evaluations of teaching effectiveness, all aimed at sharpening the accuracy and impact of their Digital Application. As for teachers with more than 11 years in the classroom — especially those who’ve passed the 16-year mark — they bring deep teaching experience to the table but tend to be less open to new technologies, so the training for them should start from basic operational skills, follow a small-step, multi-cycle model, and draw on the subject-specific pedagogy they know well to explore ways of blending digital technology with traditional teaching methods. At the same time, setting up a novice-veteran teacher pairing mechanism (Zhu & Liang et al., 2024) and using things like online workshops and case-sharing sessions can get young teachers’ tech strengths and senior teachers’ teaching experience flowing in both directions, so the two sets of capabilities truly round each other out.

6.2 Adapting Infrastructure and Resources to Locational Disparities

In view of the reality that township schools score lower in the Digital Awareness dimension and are generally weak in Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills and Digital Application, it is recommended that targeted strategies be implemented at two levels: infrastructure and digital resources (Wu & Jiang, 2026; Kou & Hao, 2026). At the infrastructure level, border township schools should be equipped with smart teaching terminals such as interactive whiteboards supporting multilingual switching and high-speed network devices. A dual-guarantee mechanism combining county-level technical maintenance teams with remote technical support should be established, involving regular inspections of equipment usage and rapid responses to technical problems such as network lag and system compatibility, so as to resolve the predicament of having equipment that is hard to use or cannot be used effectively. Place-based education serves as an important lever for linking rural education with locally grounded educational contexts and advancing the modernization of rural education (Ding et al., 2023). So, at the digital resource level, building a border ethnic English teaching resource repository that blends national common English resources with local characteristic content, and creating digital tools for bilingual classrooms — like electronic bilingual picture books, ethnic cultural English micro-lectures, and multilingual teaching courseware templates — can, through regional sharing platforms, bring about a “developed by one school, reused by multiple schools” model; furthermore, by tapping into ethnic minority teachers’ sharp perception that digital technology can ease the shortage of English teachers in border ethnic minority regions, and by making use of the ethnic education section of the National Smart Education Platform, the design of bilingual teaching technology workshops that weave ethnic cultural elements into digital resource development would help fix the problem of insufficient cultural adaptability in traditional training.

6.3 Constructing a Continuous Support Mechanism Anchored in Student Development

The issues of the knowing-doing gap in the Professional Development dimension and the limited translation of teachers’ digital literacy into classroom practice call for a support mechanism centered on student development. The first task is to set a clear objective orientation: the yardstick for judging whether teachers’ digital literacy development is effective should be tied to how well it sparks students’ interest in English learning, builds their cross-cultural communication competence, and lifts their academic performance, so that technology application returns to its fundamental educational purpose (Li & Wang, 2025). Besides the resource repository, creating a closed-loop assessment and diagnostic system that integrates digital literacy evaluation tools into daily teaching makes it possible to continuously track students’ digital learning behaviors and analyze real-time classroom feedback, helping teachers gauge the impact of their technology use and setting off a cycle of teaching reflection, instructional design refinement, and teaching effectiveness optimization; tying teachers’ digital literacy levels to institutional mechanisms like credit recognition for school-based training and professional title evaluation indicators (Zhang & Yu, 2025), paired with the introduction of a dedicated competition for digital technology-empowered English teaching that leverages competitions to push teachers to turn digital technology into practical capabilities that tangibly improve instruction, would strengthen incentive and support measures; a collaborative teacher-student development model that capitalizes on students’ strengths in handling digital technology is another avenue worth exploring, with a student-as-mentor mechanism allowing teachers to refine their instructional design based on students’ feedback about digital learning tools (Wu & Liu, 2026) and driving a coordinated uplift in both teachers’ and students’ digital literacy.

7 Conclusion

This study, taking secondary school English teachers in the border ethnic minority regions of Guangxi as the research participants, has empirically revealed the group characteristic of their digital literacy that “awareness takes the lead while practice lags behind”. The findings show that teachers score relatively high in the dimensions of Digital Social Responsibility and Digital Awareness, but are clearly weak in practical aspects such as Digital Technology Knowledge and Skills and Digital Application; the years of teaching experience factor acts as a key variable causing capability differentiation, with a significant gap existing between younger and experienced teachers; and township schools still remain comparatively disadvantaged in terms of resource allocation and professional development opportunities. The convergence of these problems means that enhancing the digital literacy of English teachers in border ethnic minority regions cannot be resolved through simple technical training alone, but is rather a systematic project involving awareness raising, capacity building, resource adaptation, and institutional safeguards.

In response to the above dilemmas, the preceding sections of this paper have sought breakthroughs along three pathways: first, constructing a stratified training mechanism tailored to years of teaching experience differences so that teachers at different developmental stages can find suitable channels for advancement; second, channeling digital resources to address locational disparities and solve the practical challenge of township schools “having equipment but struggling to use it well”; and third, establishing a continuous support mechanism anchored in student development to return teachers’ technology application to its fundamental educational purpose.

The three pathways differ in focus, yet they all circle around a single core question: how digital technology can genuinely take root in English classrooms within border ethnic minority regions. A couple of limitations deserve mention. For one, the confirmatory factor analysis produced fit indices (CFI = 0.856, TLI = 0.845, RMSEA = 0.095, SRMR = 0.106) that only fell within relaxed thresholds — pointing to a factorial structure that may not be as robust as it should be, so dimension-level comparisons ought to be drawn with caution; refining the scale for this population will call for future validation work with larger and more varied samples. For another, the sample is limited to selected border ethnic minority areas inside Guangxi. Broadening the geographic reach, taking up mixed methods to trace how teachers’ digital literacy evolves over time, and looking into mechanisms that blend technology empowerment with the preservation of ethnic cultural heritage would all help supply stronger theoretical and empirical support for pushing forward the strategy of building a leading country in education in these regions.

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