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Abstract
The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in educational contexts necessitates a critical examination of its integration into teacher preparation programs. The current study aims to investigate the perceptions and experiences of 60 pre-service EFL teachers at Vinh University regarding the use of AI-assisted tools in lesson planning. A mixed-methods research design was employed. Data were collected via a structured questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with a subset of 10 selected participants. The quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed and then integrated to capture both the breadth and depth of their experiences.
The findings indicate that while pre-service teachers overwhelmingly view AI as a beneficial pedagogical scaffold, including enhanced efficiency, creativity, and material development, they concurrently encounter significant pedagogical and ethical challenges. The main obstacles reported are contextual misalignment, wherein AI-generated content requires substantial adaptation for specific classroom realities, alongside persistent concerns regarding content reliability and the potential erosion of teacher agency through overreliance. Notably, the respondents demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of ethical dimensions, raising critical issues pertaining to plagiarism, misinformation, algorithmic transparency, and data privacy. Overall, the study reveals a cautiously optimistic stance among pre-service teachers, who embrace AI's affordances while advocating for critical, ethically-grounded implementation. These findings have salient implications for curriculum design and policy development aimed at fostering a balanced and reflexive AI literacy in language teacher education.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, pre-service EFL teachers, lesson planning, teacher agency, ethical challenges, mixed-methods research.
