Exploring EFL Students’ Perceived Changes in Emotional Engagement and Perceptual Skills After Prolonged Use of AI-Based Tools: A Qualitative Study

Recently, the use of different forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been highlighted in second/foreign language (L2) education. However, the psycho-affective consequences of using such tools for a long period of time have received insufficient scholarly attention. To address this gap, the present research aimed to examine the impact of prolonged AI adoption on English as a foreign language (EFL) students' emotional engagement and perceptual skills. It employed a qualitative design using semi-structured interviews with 57 Chinese students. The results of manual thematic analysis revealed eight ways in which AI adoption could affect the participants' emotional engagement and perceptual skills. Particularly, it was found that by increasing intrinsic motivation and academic interest, enhancing autonomy and confidence, reducing negative emotions, and increasing emotional safety the prolonged use of AI could positively affect students' emotional engagement. Furthermore, the students declared that their perceptual skills could develop by prolonged AI adoption through the capacity of such tools in increasing phonological awareness, fostering multisensory learning, facilitating lexical-structural recognition, and enhancing auditory-visual decoding skills. The study discusses the obtained outcomes and provides practical implications for L2 educators and educational policymakers regarding the contributions of AI-mediated education to learners' psycho-affective factors.