Integrating AI Literacy into Initial Teacher Education for English Language Teaching

Abstract

The paper takes the argument that AI has significant potential in teacher education, especially English Language Teaching (ELT) but teachers’ preparedness, classroom practices, and institutional support may all be factors that hinder or facilitate the adoption of AI. What the study did was it used TPACK and TELL frameworks to analyze how teacher education might incorporate AI. The study’s context was AI in teacher education. One hundred English language teacher educators out of five universities were the participants of the purposive sampling method. All of them were familiar with or interested in AI, supported teaching. The data were collected via a structured questionnaire on the interviewees readiness, pedagogical influence, and adoption barriers. Data were also gathered through open-ended questions in order to gain additional qualitative data. The study showed that the teachers who were able to incorporate AI in their teaching were very satisfied due to the feedback that the students got from the AI, as well as the increase in enthusiasm among the students. Most importantly, AI was still just another teaching tool used alongside others, not the one effecting a complete transformation in the teaching, learning process. Lack of enough institutional support, lack of infrastructures, poor teacher training, and ethical issues in terms of problems such as privacy, data, and algorithmic bias, were some of the issues identified as barriers to AI adoption.