Abstract: With the proliferation and application of generative artificial intelligence, the concept of “digital education” has become deeply embedded across all aspects of foreign language teaching in higher education. This has elevated digital literacy to a key criterion for assessing the professional competence of university English teachers. This paper focuses on English teachers at application-oriented college, conducting a tiered systematic analysis of their current digital literacy development from two dimensions: teacher's inner awareness and the educational environment. It identifies the primary influencing factors. Combining this with the teaching resources, students'characteristics, and the need of teachers'personal development, the optimizing strategies are proposed. These include strengthening digital awareness, conducting systematic digital skills training, constructing digital resource platforms, and improving the evaluation mechanism of digital. Practice has shown that the above strategies can significantly improve the digital teaching level of English teachers, optimize classroom teaching quality, and also help stimulate students'innovative and critical thinking.

Key words: Digital literacy, Application-oriented college, English teachers, Current development status, Influencing factors, Optimizing strategies