Integration or Hesitation: Unraveling Factors Affecting Teachers’ Inclination towards Personal and Students’ Adoption of Generative AI in Language Instruction

Abstract

Despite increasing calls for integrating generative AI (GAI) into education, individual teachers still show disparate attitudes and actions. It is thereby pivotal to understand the reasons behind such divergent responses. However, factors affecting teachers’ uptake of GAI in their instruction, particularly their endorsement of students’ engagement with such technology in instructed learning, remain under-explored. This study queried this topic by interviewing 17 language teachers teaching at 10 universities across China. Data analyses identified a range of specific factors underlying those teachers’ decision to integrate GAI. The study also revealed that the motivating and inhibiting patterns behind teachers’ personal engagement with GAI differed from those behind their endorsement of students’ GAI use in teaching, suggesting that different dimensions of GAI integration into instruction may be influenced by different sets of factors, and thus may need to be treated separately in practical movement towards GAI integration. Other implications for educational change in the context of GAI are also discussed.