Speaker
Description
While artificial intelligence (AI) tools are rapidly advancing and opening up innovative avenues for foreign language teaching and learning (Edmett et al., 2024; Garzón et al., 2023; Kundu & Bej, 2025), the regulatory frameworks and policies governing their use remain largely underdeveloped. In language education, AI is increasingly integrated into academic assessment, yet having increasingly sparked scrutiny regarding academic fairness, authenticity, and transparency. Prior research has predominantly focused on perceptions of or attitudes toward AI, leaving a critical gap in understanding teachers' ethical reasoning – particularly in Vietnam, where official policies regarding AI in assessment remain absent. Focusing on high school EFL educators across Vietnam, this research investigates how they reason ethically about student AI use in assessment tasks. This paper employs mixed-methods design: a scenario-based questionnaires administered to 50 teachers identifies key patterns in evaluative judgments while semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 selected participants explore the underlying dilemmas in those judgments. The findings are expected to reveal the specific strategies teachers use to monitor and regulate AI use in their classrooms, the key factors shaping their evaluative choices and the struggles they face in maintaining grading fairness and concerns about AI-assisted plagiarism. Ultimately, by discovering how teachers identify ethical uncertainty in the absence of sufficient policy, this paper offers an empirical grounding for future policy formulation and professional development, contributing to the growing discourse on AI ethics in language assessment.
Key words: Policy absence, student AI use, AI ethics in education, high school EFL teachers, language assessment
