Speaker
Description
As real-time AI translation increasingly reduces the need for conventional language proficiency in some forms of cross-linguistic communication, a more fundamental question emerges for English language teachers: what is their profession for when translation itself can be technologically mediated? This study explores how novice English language teachers reimagine professional purpose and identity in response to this emerging possibility. A small-scale qualitative study was conducted with six novice teachers working in Vietnamese higher education. Data were generated through future-oriented vignette-based interviews in which participants first articulated their current professional identities, then responded to a plausible scenario of widespread real-time AI translation, and finally reflected on possible future teacher selves. Analysis combined thematic coding with an identity-positioning lens. The findings show that participants did not converge on a single AI-era teacher identity. Instead, they re-anchored professional purpose beyond basic linguistic mediation, emphasizing human connection, intercultural understanding, strategic communication, technological agency, critical voice, or, in one case, the intrinsic value of linguistic mastery. Their future identities reflected divergent trajectories of consolidation, expansion, intensification, and repositioning. Across cases, feared futures centred less on technological replacement than on deprofessionalization—the loss of expertise, judgement, agency, or meaningful human contribution. The study argues that professional purpose may mediate between present professional self-understanding and imagined future identities. It suggests that teacher education should move beyond asking how teachers can use AI to also ask what English education should be for in an increasingly AI-mediated multilingual world.
