Prospective roles of language teachers in AI-assisted language teaching: An action research

With the arrival of open generative AI, one of the most hotly debated topics is whether AI will replace human teachers in a language classroom (Gao, 2024; Li et al., 2024; Wen, 2024b). Though a general consensus has been reached that AI will partly replace language teachers, the roles of language teachers are underexplored in AI-assisted language teaching. This article reports on an action research of an AI-assisted language course collaborated by three Chinese teachers and a foreign teacher with AI Xiao Ya serving as an assistant to explore the curriculum development and teachers’ roles. The problems faced by instructors are the efficacy of integrating story reading with creative writing in an intensive course and piloting Xiao Ya as an AI teaching assistant (TA). After an intensive course of two weeks with a cohort of forty-three students majoring in the humanities, a questionnaire was circulated online to collect their feedback on the curriculum implementation and perceptions of AI as a TA. Voluntary interviewees were also recruited to elaborate on the given questionnaire items. It is found that although the curriculum of integrating story reading with creative writing is perceived successful by the majority of students, the roles of language teachers have been expanded from the traditional ones as curriculum planners, activity organizers, and language instructors to AI trainers and collaborators with AI engineers. Though language teachers embrace AI technology, AI has yet to reach a stage of fully lessening the workload of language teachers, let alone replacing them. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .