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In the field of artificial intelligence, information technology plays a crucial role in the development of foreign language teachers. It not only offers essential learning content, but also enables foreign language educators to upgrade their skills and knowledge. In 2018, the Chinese Ministry of Education launched an initiative to introduce artificial intelligence into teaching, which aims to promote the professional development of teachers and encourage them to adapt to new technological changes. Artificial intelligence has revolutionized traditional foreign language education and teaching methods, bringing both opportunities and challenges. To effectively apply AI to foreign language education, it is necessary to cultivate the information-based teaching ability of foreign language teachers and improve their information literacy. This will be the key factor in integrating information technology and foreign language education and teaching. Therefore, it is crucial to provide comprehensive training and support for foreign language teachers in terms of information technology and AI. Only by doing so can we ensure that AI technology plays a positive role in foreign language education and teaching, ultimately benefiting both the teachers and students.
Information literacy includes three aspects: information awareness, information knowledge, and information ability. Therefore, whether foreign language teachers have information literacy can be examined from three aspects: whether they have an inherent demand for information and actively think of using information; whether they know advanced information theories and information technologies, such as basic computer knowledge, network technology, and multimedia knowledge; and whether they are good at using information technology to acquire, process, innovate, and generate new information (Godbey, 2018). As the key factor of higher education, teachers are the guides of talent cultivation in innovative society and the practitioners of scientific research innovation (Saikkonen & Kaarakainen, 2021).
Artificial intelligence is a comprehensive discipline that studies how to use computers to simulate and extend human brain functions. At present, text, image and speech recognition, machine translation, speech synthesis, natural language understanding, and other artificial intelligence technologies have been applied to foreign language education and teaching. Since the 21st century, the new generation of AI technology has been updated rapidly. In the field of education, great changes have taken place in teaching behavior and learning activities. In this case, teachers must improve their information literacy in order to meet the challenges brought by AI technology, and college foreign language teachers are no exception. Only by comprehensively improving their information literacy can they actively meet the opportunities and challenges brought by AI (Top et al., 2021; List, 2019). As a profession held to a high standard, teachers urgently need to have higher information literacy skills integrated in their professional development (Hanell, 2017; Majid et al., 2020). On the one hand, teachers should be able to master and apply new teaching technologies; on the other hand, they should use information technology to improve their scientific research ability (Schoenbach & Greenleaf, 2017; Gunes & Bahcivan, 2018).
The concept of information literacy first appeared in 1974. As a diversified concept, information literacy is based on information technology. It refers to the ability to skillfully use information technology tools through information technology training to obtain required information and solve relevant problems (Claro et al., 2018). The research on teachers' information literacy in education circles is based on the professional characteristics of teachers. Teachers' information literacy points to education and teaching practice. It is of great significance to study foreign language teachers' information literacy in the context of artificial intelligence.