Speaker
Description
The EFL-to-ESL transition has conventionally been conceptualized as a social process through physical immersion, extensive exposure, and authentic communication. Traditional linguistic authority has largely been centralized in institutional curricula, textbooks, and teachers that facilitate learners’ access to standardized linguistic norms. Despite promoting learner autonomy and distributed participation, technology, including computer-assisted language learning has been regarded as a pedagogical tool rather than an epistemic authority.The emergence of Generative AI challenges this assumption with credible sources of linguistic knowledge through personalized feedback, immediate support and conversational interaction.
Little has been known about how AI reconfigures traditional authority relationships among teachers, learners, and linguistic norms that may negotiate legitimacy in language learning. Therefore, this conceptual paper proposes that AI can simulate ESL participation without physical immersion in the Vietnamese context, in contrast to conventional understandings of EFL-to-ESL transition as geographically bounded.
With a distributed linguistic authority framework, this paper theorizes the redistribution of authority across institutional, human, and algorithmic agents in digital-mediated language environments. It contributes by reconceptualizing EFL-to-ESL transition as a process increasingly influenced by algorithmic participation and reorganized epistemic trust.
