the online world: iranian efl teachers’ media literacy and its contribution to their tpack

In the modern era of digital media, it is increasingly becoming harder to ignore the role of media in education, in general, and language teaching, in particular. communication, as the main focus of language teaching, is undeniably interwoven with media and media literacy is nowadays not just a privilege, but a requirement. therefore, it seems timely to investigate the status of media literacy in local efl teachers and probe the ways it contributes to a set of other closely-related competencies such as their technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack). tpack is defined as a harmonious combination of technological knowledge and pedagogical skills for teachers in order to maximize the efficiency of their classroom practices. this definition explains the interest of the present research in probing the connection between these two variables. for this purpose, a media literacy questionnaire as well as the tpack-efl questionnaire were given to 191 iranian efl teachers based on snowball sampling. after a descriptive analysis of the media literacy status among teachers, a set of pearson correlations and a multiple regression analysis were run on the data. the results indicated a significantly positive correlation between teachers’ media literacy and their tpack including all its subscales except for functional consuming and content knowledge. also, functional prosumption was found to show the highest correlations with tpack subscales, followed by critical prosumption, and critical consumption. by running a regression analysis, tpack subscales were proved to be significantly predicted by media literacy subscales. all in all, the findings confirm the importance of media literacy in efl teachers’ ability to make use of their fullest technological and pedagogical capabilities and remind teacher educators and policy makers to move forward towards more recent horizons of media and literacy.