I. INTRODUCTION
Technology has long influenced the teaching and learning of second and foreign languages, although what counts as technology and how it is pedagogically mobilized has changed considerably over time. Earlier technology use largely centered around mechanical and electronic devices that aimed to increase target language exposure or promote interactive learning environments (Chen et al., 2021; Zhu & Wang, 2025). As digital communication tools evolved, literacy practices and the meaning of being literate shifted correspondingly (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007), and technology use gradually moved toward interactive, participatory, and multi/trans-modal meaning-making processes that support learner and teacher agency in classroom and online contexts (Ayedoun et al., 2019; Tseng et al., 2022). In recent years, however, English as a foreign language (EFL) education in Korea has entered an additional phase distinguished not only by digitization but by artificial intelligence, particularly through the introduction and implementation of AIDT (Artificial Intelligence Digital Textbook) into the public education domain.
AIDT in this study is conceptualized as a pedagogically structured multimedia platform that integrates written (i.e., text), spoken (i.e., audio and video), and interactive functions to provide authentic English input, support various classroom activities, and produce and analyze learner data as well as teacher’s teaching practice for instructional purposes. It is thus more than a digital replication of printed textbooks and pen-and-paper-based English education. This emerging initiative in Korea has drawn national and international attention; yet, the implementation of AIDT has been politically contested (Y. Kim, 2025). Only after a short period of the AIDT introduction, its status as official textbook has been downgraded to educational materials-a policy move that was criticized as short-sighted and in conflict with national AI goals (W.-b. Kim, 2025; Y.-h. Kim, 2025). This policy turbulence highlights the fact that the Korean AIDT issue is not solely a matter of technological innovation but of political decision-making which complicates classroom-level practice and teacher preparation.
Within this context, the implications for teacher education are profound. While prior studies on AIDT examined AI-based instructional tools and their pedagogical affordances, significantly less attention has been paid to how preservice teachers in Korea learn to utilize it and conceptualize and enact teaching with AIDT. This gap is critical today because preservice teachers should learn not only how to operate AI tools including AIDT but also how to practice AI-mediated instructional design. In AI-powered educational contexts, teachers are no longer regarded merely as language providers; instead, they need to design, orchestrate, and justify learning sequences that take full advantage of AIDT and other newly introduced tools and materials in principled ways. The question, then, is not only whether AIDT can improve learning but instead how future teachers learn to teach with it.
In this vein, microteaching provides an analytically meaningful and developmentally consequential context for examining how preservice teachers approach AIDT-mediated instructional design. Microteaching in this course was a structured practice-based activity in which preservice teachers planned and enacted short teaching English in English (TEE) lessons using AIDT as a central instructional resource. Through these pedagogical experiments and experiences, preservice teachers made instructional decisions justified those decisions, and negotiated the opportunities and constraints embedded in AIDT-based elementary EFL teaching.
The purpose of this study is to examine how preservice Korean English teachers incorporated AIDT into their microteaching practice and how they perceived AIDT-centered English instruction. By analyzing microteaching demonstrations and reflections regarding AIDT for Korean young EFLers, this study aims to contribute to understanding teacher learning in the era of AIDT in the Korean EFL context and to inform future directions for English teacher education in Korea’s AIDT era. Since little empirical research has been done to examine the ways preservice teachers make sense of AIDT and operationalize its pedagogical affordances despite the demand of AIDT, it sets up two research questions that seek mainly to describe Korean preservice teachers’ utilization of AIDT:
1. How do Korean preservice teachers utilize AIDT in their microteaching?
2. What are their perceptions regarding teaching English through AIDT?
II. A REVIEW OF RELATED STUDIES ON AIDT IN KOREAN ELT
Recently, a handful of research specifically on AIDT in the context of Korean English language teaching (ELT) begun to emerge, which reflects broader changes in the Korean English classrooms as part of national curriculum reforms being influenced by broader technological transformation. In order to understand how this emerging field is being discussed and empirically examined, the current review synthesizes three interconnected strands with the focus on AIDT in public school domain: (1) research focusing on learners, (2) research emphasizing teachers and teacher education, and (3) research exposing gaps in studies on preservice teachers. This organizational logic provides a coherent basis for comparing how AIDT is theorized, experienced, and pedagogically justified across different educational discourses.
Learner-focused research highlights AIDT’s potential to enhance engagement, participation and differentiated learning. Those in elementary English classrooms report that AI-based listening and speaking lessons increase learners’ motivation, participation and comprehension even among learners with varied levels of familiarity with smart devices (Bang, 2025), and that adaptive reading functions personalize instruction by adjusting to students’ development levels (Lee, 2024). Collectively, these studies suggest that AIDT can support learner autonomy and individualized learning pathways. But there have been concerns regarding accuracy, task concentration, and the need for more robust self-directed learning support (Kim & Heo, 2025; Lee, 2023). The literature remains largely descriptive, with limited inquiry into how AIDT outcomes are shaped by instructional framing, sociocultural contexts, or pedagogical values, which points out the need for more theoretically grounded explanations.
Teacher and teacher education research emphasizes teachers’ positive expectations for enhancing learner investment, realizing personalized feedback and learning guidance, and AI-supported assessment (Kim & Ahn, 2025). At the same time, concerns also persist about infrastructure readiness, access disparity, content reliability, and teachers’ digital competence that might go beyond TPACK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) (Kim, 2022). Inservice consistently stress the need for practice-centered professional development, peer communities of practice, and institutional support, which reflects a preference for experiential learning over directive policy proposals. Instruction models and feature-selective frameworks have been proposed to support practical integration (Cho & Jung, 2024; Lee & Maeng, 2025; Sim, 2024). Nevertheless, this strand often remains prescriptive and technology-centered, with a focus on functionalities rather than describing how teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and professional identities interact with AI-powered media in the lived complexity of classroom practice. In this regards, TPACK-oriented research argued that technology knowledge intersects with content and pedagogy in non-linear ways (Kim, 2022), suggesting that the meaningful use of AIDT requires more than being familiar with AIDT platform features.
As for preservice teachers, which is the gap in the literature on AIDT, similar ambivalence about teacher autonomy and professional roles are discussed (Shin & Kim, 2025). For example, research in the secondary school contexts indicate that effective use of AIDT largely depends on teachers’ ability to interpret, adjust and pedagogically reposition functions and features relative to learners’ cognitive and emotional needs (Park, 2023). However, few examined preservice teachers’ actual classroom enactment of AIDT in practice-based environments (i.e., microteaching). This absence is significant in that preservice teachers’ early classroom-based engagements with AIDT will shape future conceptions of teacher identity, classroom language use, and instructional judgment. Prior research also suggests that teaching in English (e.g., TEE) itself may not be necessarily a central source of fear or resistance for elementary preservice teachers (Lee, 2020), which indicates that the more substantive challenge may lie in determining how to teach through a new medium, not how to run their class through English according to TEE policy. In this vein, the absence of empirical work capturing how preservice teachers negotiate when teaching with AIDT represents a major gap in the current literature.
Existing research on AIDT in Korean ELT, specifically within public education, reflects broad optimism about its technological promise but also shows limited understanding of how such tools transform instruction in real classroom settings. Much of the literature highlights potential affordances or proposes instructional frameworks. And few studies examine what actually happens when teachers utilize AIDT with learners. Exploring preservice teachers’ microteaching with AIDT therefore is expected to offer a way to connect technological innovation to observable instructional behavior and the development of teacher identity. This study addresses this gap by investigating how preservice teachers in the context of Korean elementary school education integrate AIDT into their microteaching and how they conceptualize its pedagogical role within Korean elementary ELT.
III. METHOD
1. Research Context
The present study reports on a course offered by the English education department of a college specializing in elementary teacher preparation in the first semester, from March to June, of 2025. Preservice teachers engaged with theories and practices of ELT with a particular focus on instruction for Korean EFL elementary learners. The course was partly supported by a series of instructional modules that, for example, introduced key theoretical concepts of digital literacy grounded in New Literacies Studies (NLS) and multimodalities (e.g., Knobel & Lankshear, 2007), surveyed recent cases of digital and AI-enhanced instructional practices in local and Asian English education (e.g., Im, 2020; Ryu & Kim, 2024), and familiarized preservice teachers with emerging AIDT applications and AIDT platforms widely adopted in many Korean elementary English education such as Pengtalk (Choi, 2024) or metaversebased initiatives (e.g., Hwang & Lee, 2024; H. Kim, 2025). In addition, the participants examined media coverage related to AIDT development in Korea (e.g., Jung, 2025) and explored the functional properties and pedagogical features of AIDT through workshops and live-streaming lectures provided by AIDT publishing companies (Shin & Kim, 2025). These modules facilitated the participants’ self-directed exploration of AIDT and informed their pedagogical decision making throughout the semester.
The present study foregrounds microteaching as the primary site through which the pedagogical engagement with AIDT is interpreted, because microteaching constitutes a critical developmental mechanism for preservice English teachers. Microteaching is thus the central analytic focus of this study. Preservice teachers designed and delivered 15-to-30-minute short lessons within a limited time frame in front of their peers. This structured teaching practice enabled them to apply pedagogical concepts, experiment with AIDT specifically made for Korean EFL elementary school learners, receive feedback, negotiate instructional choices, and make sense of their own developing professional identity as future English teachers (Lee, 2017; Park, 2009; Park, 2015). Microteaching also operated as an epistemic site whereby they made consequential judgments about how AIDT could or should be positioned, constrained, and justified within elementary EFL classrooms. Because instructional decisions made within microteaching were publicly accountable to peers and the instructor, this activity served as a semi-consequential performance context rather than a simple rehearsal event. Conferences with the instructor were provided upon request as a form of instructional support for microteaching planning and preparation, which is recognized as a productive teacher learning support structure (Lee, 2012).
2. Data Collection and Analysis
A total of 4 course sections offered during the first semester of 2025 formed the data of the study. The participating preservice teachers were divided into 18 small groups to conduct microteaching demonstrations that incorporated AIDT as a central instructional component. A total of 110 students participated across these sections, and the author served as the instructor who not only observed but assessed all microteaching performances with evaluation conducted at the team level. The use of AIDT was a required element of lesson design although all participants could supplement their instruction with other digital or print materials. Among several available AIDT platforms, one widely and freely accessible AIDT (referred to as Y AIDT) at the time of the data collection was primarily adopted for teaching demonstrations. This platform allowed a single teacher-role participant to interact with maximum 5 student participants simultaneously, enabling the teacher to manage and coordinate the other students’ interfaces and activities in real time.
The study drew on a rich set of qualitative data that captured different aspects of the participants’ engagement with AIDT. The data included video recordings of all microteaching sessions (which was a school policy for microteaching), the author’s written memos from during microteaching and post-teaching discussions, written reflections produced by the participants (which was also a part of mandatory task according to a school policy), and informal conversations about their experiences using AIDT. These sources provided complementary insights into how these preservice teachers approached AIDT-based English teaching and how their pedagogical thinking evolved through hands-on practice. The analysis concentrated on identifying how AIDT was incorporated into instructional decisions and classroom interactions as well as on understanding how they articulated their perceptions, challenges, and pedagogical insights on AIDT-based English teaching.
The recorded video clips of students’ microteaching sessions were viewed repeatedly to identify patterns in how AIDT features were integrated into lesson design and classroom interaction. Attention was given to instructional decisions such as how teachers introduced and navigated AIDT functions, how they used AIDT features, and how they engaged with peers who played student roles through AIDT-mediated activities. Instances of pedagogical innovation, adaptation, or struggle were noted real-time, along with contextual factors that shaped their instructional choices. Additionally, in-class discussions and casual conversations following the microteaching sessions were selectively transcribed after initial screening and analyzed thematically. These conversations offered deeper insights into the participants’ reasoning behind particular instructional choices, their perceptions of AIDT’s pedagogical potential values and limitations, and their reflections on the broader implications of AI for English education in Korea. Reflection notes written by the participants served as an additional source of triangulation, helping to document and expand the themes identified in the video and discussion data (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). While detailed evaluation criteria are beyond the scope of the paper, particular analytic attention during evaluation was directed toward how each team employed AIDT, for what instructional purposes, and how these purposes were justified and realized in their microteaching practice. Moreover, because the analysis adopted an interpretive and exploratory qualitative stance, the study did not pursue statistical inter-rater agreement. Instead, analytic rigor was to a large extent established through iterative, repeated engagement with the data, constant comparison, and triangulation across video records, written reflections, and post-teaching discussion materials for which the author was located at the very moment of the data generation and analysis happening at the research site. These procedures align with credibility-oriented approaches to qualitative thematic inquiry rather than coder reliability metrics.
The analysis was conducted as an iterative and interpretive process, drawing upon the principles of qualitative thematic inquiry (Braun & Clarke, 2021; Creswell & Poth, 2017; Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). Rather than following a predetermined coding framework, the analytic process adopted an open and exploratory stance that allowed themes to emerge inductively through sustained engagement with the data. While not all procedural steps of thematic analysis were implemented, key aspects of Braun and Clarke’s (2021) approach such as identifying meaningful patterns across multiple data sources and refining these into broader thematic categories were partially utilized to guide the interpretation. This partial adoption was necessary because the study sought not only to capture recurring patterns among the preservice teachers’ structured microteaching cases but also to explore the nuanced ways wherein the preservice teachers being trained to use AIDT interacted with and conceptualized AIDT, which required analytical flexibility beyond a fully structured thematic framework.
The video recordings of microteaching sessions, written reflections, and selected transcripts of post-teaching discussions were examined repeatedly to trace how preservice teachers navigated the affordances and constraints of AIDT in their instructional practices. Attention was given to the pedagogical reasoning underlying instructional decisions, the ways AIDT’s role in EFL classrooms was conceptualized, and the tensions or uncertainties expressed during adaptation to AIDT-powered teaching practices. Through a process of constant comparison and iterative refinement, preliminary codes were developed into thematic categories that captured how AIDT was appropriated in practice and how such experiences informed evolving beliefs and identities as future English teachers. The integration of multiple data sources further enriched the analysis and enhanced the credibility of the findings through triangulation (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). While its analysis prioritized identifying patterns that recurred across cases, certain atypical but pedagogically interesting cases were also separately examined. These cases were therefore included not because they represented common tendencies but because they could provide theoretically meaningful insight into how AIDT could be differently (in)appropriated in Korean EFLers’ microteaching.
IV. RESULT
This section is organized according to the two research questions. The first two subsections present descriptive accounts of how preservice teachers utilized AIDT in their microteaching. The subsequent two subsections focus on their perceptions of running their English class through AIDT, particularly in relation to teachers’ roles in TEE classroom and their conceptualization of AIDT. Due to the purpose of the study that was to examine preservice teachers’ engagement with AIDT in microteaching practice, a descriptive orientation is necessary to illustrate how AIDT was utilized pedagogically and what behaviors were followed. Additionally, because this study sought to make visible how novice elementary preservice teachers approached and enacted AIDT for the first time, some examples described below intentionally highlight individual teams’ cases that may not represent generalizable tendencies but illuminate important instructional possibilities and tensions. This descriptive focus provides the empirical grounding needed to interpret their perceptions within the context of Korean elementary English teaching.
1. Coming Back to Pattern Drills and Talking to AIDT
The most prominent classroom practice observed was students’ speaking activities conducted through AIDT. The participating preservice teachers seemed to consider the speaking-related functions of AIDT the most beneficial or prominent among other AIDT features and therefore sought to use them actively (Sim, 2024). However, heavy reliance on AIDT’s automated diagnostic feature, which labeled learners’ speech as either acceptable (indicated in green) or unacceptable (indicated in red), sometimes resulted in one-way learner behavior. This pattern of heavily utilizing speech-related functions was observed consistently across all microteaching teams without exception. The students often engaged in individual speaking tasks directed toward their devices, with each learner interacting only with their own AIDT without peer interaction or interaction with a teacher in producing spoken language. In such cases, those who took teacher roles found few opportunities for instructional intervention and frequently limited their role to merely observing whether learners spoke into their devices as illustrated in Figure 1 below.
This suggests that the exclusive use of or the over-reliance solely on AIDT does not guarantee effective learning. This selective concentration on only a small number of AIDT functions available may be interpreted as a result of the preservice teachers’ limited pedagogy repertoire or incomplete familiarity with the new medium AIDT. According to Kim (2022), from a TPACK perspective, content knowledge in English education should precede a teacher’s understanding of technology, but the emergence of AIDT appears to ask another layer of technological learning to use its affordances maximumly. In this sense, even with sufficient pedagogical and content knowledge, preservice teachers still seemed to need additional technological knowledge in order to actualize AIDT’s potential in practice. Those who included some teacher-centered, traditional teaching style showcased somewhat different scenes. The integration of supplementary materials or more active teacher involvement can in fact provide additional opportunities for learner-teacher interaction and enhance students’ focus on teacher-led explanations. Figure 2 illustrates how teachers’ moving away from AIDT can be realized, which in turn fosters a more interactive classroom atmosphere. The cases of the two teams below illustrate moments of increased interaction through the use of TPR (Total Physical Response) and explicit instruction supported by physical items.
Another team’s case demonstrated a similar pattern in which those taking student roles did not actively engage in interaction with peers or the teacher but instead interacted primarily with their own AIDT, specifically the microphone on their laptop to ensure their voices were recognized by the system. Figure 3 illustrates that, despite the desk arrangement designed to facilitate learner interaction as often the case in the Korean elementary school classroom, the students in the scene focused solely on speaking into their devices. They even leaned their bodies closer toward their own laptops in an effort to prevent other learners’ utterances from being captured. What is also interesting was a female student’s use of earphone with a built-in microphone to the laptop AIDT. She spoke directly into her AIDT while listening to the AIDT’s multimedia audio through the earbuds.
This behavior not only created a physical barrier that made herself isolated from surrounding peers but also impeded the student’s ability to hear and respond to the teacher’s instructions. This situation of her being isolated underscores how AIDT-based self-learning during class might create an overly individualized situation and probably undermine chances for collaboration and diminish teacher presence in the classroom. What this situation showed also indicates that the implementation of AIDT could yield problematic or less appropriate learning situations. While various technological aspects of AIDT including voice recognition and automatic grading on learner’s pronunciation are often regarded as advantages that AIDT can bring to the classroom (Sim, 2024), it could probably produce classroom patterns that more closely resemble AIDT-questioning and learner-answering style of pattern drills.
2. Lack of Interaction Caused by AIDT
A notable theme identified in the participants’ teaching practice is about behavioral changes in the classroom that stemmed from the central presence of AIDT. As partly indicated above, the integration of AIDT as the primary tool of instruction, namely textbook, shaped their actions and interactions of both teachers and students, often producing limited classroom dynamics that differed from those of traditional, non-AIDT-based lessons. Because AIDT required continuous operation from a fixed device by a human agent, those playing teacher roles frequently had to remain at the podium or teacher’s desk where there was a desktop in order to navigate the AIDT by clicking through slides and launching activities. This restricted movement contrasted sharply with their previous teaching experiences from other classes where it was often said that teachers were encouraged to move around the classroom, monitor students’ progress more closely, and facilitate interaction. This was further intensified by the preservice teachers’ concentrated reliance on AIDT’s speech recognition function as partly seen above, even though the AIDT they utilized contained multiple interactive affordances such as collaborative drawing tools or group-based game activities that could have supported more dialogic and interactive participation. As a result, many preservice teachers felt that their role was reduced to that of an operator managing their AIDT at the desktop station rather than an active interaction facilitator of communicative exchange. This observation challenges one of the central assumptions of AIDT integration that it enhances classroom interaction and learner engagement (Lee, 2023).
Rather than actively participating in communicative activities or interacting spontaneously, students in the microteaching context often became passive receivers of the digital content being played and displayed on the screen. As shown in Figure 4 that includes three teams’ teaching moments, both teachers and students were at times observed simply watching AIDT’s multimedia materials being played together, with minimal interaction or dialogue.
This stands in contrast to the expectations expressed by in-service teachers who view AIDT as a tool that should promote active learner participation and engagement (Kim & Ahn, 2025). While young learners (e.g., 3rd graders) often find multimedia resources of AIDT interesting (Bang, 2025), older learners, especially those who would be less interested in the content, might consume them passively without participating in interaction. That is, the factors of gamifications within AIDT that are supposed to make learning more interesting and engaging in a fun way (Im, 2020; Zhang & Hasim, 2023) could not be delivered to learners or teachers in some context. These findings suggest that the presence of AIDT may inadvertently reshape classroom behavior and interaction patterns in ways that require careful pedagogical consideration. From a TPACK perspective (Kim, 2022), effective engagement with AIDT requires the capacity to integrate teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge on English education with technological knowledge of how to employ AIDT’s multimedia and multimodal features and embedded activities. In this sense, maximizing AIDT’s pedagogical potential depends not only on familiarity with the platform but on AIDT users’ ability to selectively coordinate content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and technological knowledge in meaningful interaction to support coherent instructional intentions.
3. Questioning Teacher Roles in TEE and AI Functions in AIDT
A major theme that emerged from the collected participants’ reflections was a reconsideration of their instructional roles as a teacher in a classroom when integrating AIDT into elementary English class. Many preservice teachers entered the microteaching sessions intending to design and conduct lessons that reflected the principle of TEE, an ideal teaching model in Korean ELT classrooms. However, this goal was considered difficult to achieve once they began teaching with AIDT. Because many functions and interface features from AIDT were unfamiliar to learners as well as teachers, the students in the teacher role often needed to switch to Korean to provide explanations, demonstrate procedures, and ensure that other team members taking student roles during microteaching were following instructions correctly (Kim & Heo, 2025). As one participant reflected,
I prepared my lesson entirely in English, but once I started using AIDT, I had to keep explaining how to use certain buttons in Korean because my peers could not follow just by looking.
This kind of observation suggests that, although preservice teachers seem to be okay in implementing TEE (Lee, 2020), the integration of AIDT paradoxically reduced opportunities for English use both from teachers and learners, thus constraining the amount of teacher talk and learner talk that could occur in English. Such recurring moments led many to question how TEE might need to be reinterpreted in classrooms where navigating technological tools is integral to the learning process. Many also critically reflected on the assumption that AIDT would reduce teachers’ workload and streamline classroom management. Although one of AIDT’s anticipated benefits is to minimize time spent on classroom management (Kim & Heo, 2025), the participants observed that these tasks were not removed but transformed. Teachers, based on the microteaching observations, still needed to devote significant attention to managing how students interacted with the digital platform, such as guiding them to click specific icons and buttons, navigate menus, or activate functions. One preservice teacher commented,
I thought AIDT would save me time by removing small tasks like asking students to open a page. But instead, I was constantly telling them which icon to click or checking if their screens matched mine.
These observations highlighted how AIDT introduces new layers of instructional responsibility that require sustained teacher involvement, even as traditional tasks are reshaped. Although previous research indicated experienced teachers might not experience functional difficulties in utilizing AIDT but be able to selectively navigate available AIDT functions according to their own purpose (Kim & Ahn, 2025), preservice teachers seem to have difficulty understanding how to use.
Another significant aspect of their reflection concerned the “AI” element of AIDT. Often the participants expressed skepticism about what qualifies as “AI” in the current version of the AIDTs. The built-in AI chatbot, for example, was expected to play a teacher role and offer support when learners encountered difficulties, but it often failed to engage in meaningful dialogue or provide adequate explanations of grammar and translation of vocabulary (cf., Cho & Jung, 2024; Lee, 2024). Figure 5 is an example of a student trying to use an AI chatbot to figure out the meaning of the word chant but as seen it said the vocabulary typed was out of the elementary English vocabulary list. What is interestingly non-sensical was that the word typed was part of the activity names Chant and Do.
Similarly, unlike its name AIDT, the microteaching often showed moments that AIDT’s “AI” did not function as what AI should be able to do. As seen in Figure 6, for the question of the weather snowing, several possible variations including snow or it’s snowing were not marked as answers. Thus, teachers had to revisit the answers and explain, pointing out that what the students submitted could also be considered to be correct answers for the question. This lack of AI functionality within AIDT gave a teacher more work to do.
As one participant noted for the case of AIDT chatbot (Figure 5), its limited responsiveness further illustrated the constraints of the AIDT system:
The chatbot was supposed to help when students were stuck, but it didn’t understand their questions well, and the responses were too simple. Even it does not translate a simple word when it is part of the activity name!
This AIDT’s functional gap between a teacher’s expectation and actual performance prompted preservice teachers to question the pedagogical role and instructional value of AI in its present form. Several reflected on the ambiguity of the term itself, with one remarking, “It’s called an AI textbook, but I am not sure which part is really AI.”
These reflections display how preservice teachers dealt with shifting conceptions of their professional teacher role in AIDT-mediated classrooms (Lee, 2023). They recognized that teaching with or through AIDT involves navigating linguistic choices, managing new types of classroom interaction, and critically evaluating the nature and efficiency of AIDT features. Through this process, they began to rethink what it means to be an English teacher running their English class in English in an era where technology is not merely a tool but an integral component of instructional design and classroom language practice.
4. Reimagining Textbooks and Materials in AIDT Classroom
In the participants’ reflections concerning a fundamental reconsideration of the teacher’s role and the nature of the English textbook in an AIDT-powered classroom, many preservice teachers reported that their engagement with AIDT prompted them to question long-held assumptions about how English education is structured and delivered. Although their own school experiences also included multimedia resources, such technologies were typically implemented by teachers in traditional classroom settings, and learning activities were closely tied to the design and sequence of printed textbooks. In contrast, AIDT demonstrated capabilities that extend far beyond those of conventional pen-and-paper- based textbooks. Its capacity to analyze learner performance suggests new learning pathways and also provides a wide range of supplementary materials, which means that learners can engage in English study with a degree of autonomy that was previously uncommon. Several comments from discussion after their microteaching said:
I think AIDT is a useful tool in that it allows learners to record themselves, listen back, and check whether their responses are correct. Although both teachers and students are not yet fully accustomed to using it and the AIDT itself still has functional limitations, I believe that, with continued use, meaningful ways to integrate it into instruction will emerge.
In the past, printed textbooks came with a CD at the back, and students were simply assigned to listen to it at home, which was a one-way mode of instruction. Now, with AIDT, interaction between learners and teachers can occur bi-directionally, which makes me realize how much textbooks have evolved. As teachers gain more flexibility and become more familiar with AIDT’s functions, I believe it will continue to develop further.
When I entered the platform in teacher mode, I could see the assessment categories for listening, reading, writing, speaking, phonics, presenting, and viewing. Watching the data accumulated made me think that personalized instruction could truly be possible. Because the data show which areas the class is focusing on and lessons inevitably reflect a teacher’s tendencies, it is helpful that teachers can use this information to make adjustments.
These reflections underscore how these preservice teachers with the experiences of using AIDT even in a short time period were beginning to reconceptualize the textbook not as a static instructional artifact but as a dynamic, data-driven platform that actively shapes teaching and learning practices (Kim & Ahn, 2025; Shin & Kim, 2025). Such comments suggested that they perceived textbook boundaries to be shifting and that instruction, assessment, and learner autonomy were becoming interconnected within AIDT. Moreover, tasks that once required teachers to prepare additional resources or learners to search for materials independently by themselves are now supported within the platform. As a result, AIDT has the potential to fundamentally reshape how English education is conceptualized and enacted. Rather than simply appreciating the innovative features AIDT introduces, many participants recognized the need for deeper reflection on what it means to integrate such technology into Korean English education. Central to their reflections were questions about the evolving responsibilities of teachers, the shifting expectations of learners, and the broader pedagogical implications of AI-mediated instruction.
It also led to discussing their autonomy in preparing teaching materials. For example, seen in Figure 7, one team tried to bring out-of-AIDT materials within an AIDT-based lesson to add dynamicity to their lesson flow. While it showed their ability to incorporate materials that could better appeal to Korean learners of English, whether AIDT’s openness to equip outside materials can in fact boost learning was questionable.
In other words, several participants raised concerns about the relationship between materials within AIDT and their self-made resources. While AIDT platforms allow teachers to upload additional materials such as PDFs or audio and video files and incorporate them as one of the lesson materials, the integration of these external resources into the AIDT interface was often seen as awkward and lacking coherence due to inconsistent typeface or distorted images as pointed out when a serious of pictures describing the term angry were used (Figure 7). Several preservice teachers described the pictures on screen as a sense of dissonance; when navigating between AIDT’s functions and the supplementary materials provided by teachers, it was suggested that the integration does not always result in a seamless instructional experience. The participants of the study, as partly pointed by Kim and Heo (2025) and Lee (2023), expressed uncertainty about how AIDT should be positioned in relation to teacher agency and instructional design, particularly when combining AIDT resources with teacher-created materials, not fully grasping a full, seamless shuttling between materials.
V. CONCLUSION
This study explored how Korean preservice English teachers engaged with AIDT during a semester-long course and how they enacted AIDT within AIDT-based microteaching context. By analyzing their teaching practices and reflections, it illustrates how these preservice teachers navigated the pedagogical opportunities and constraints of AIDT-centered teaching in the Korean elementary EFL context. First, findings highlighted critical interactional limitations inherent in allegedly highly technology-centered instructional arrangements. Although preservice teachers frequently utilized AIDT features such as speech recognition and automated assessment, classroom discourse often became individualized through platform-centered engagement using laptops and tablet PCs without interaction between peers or among a teacher and students. This resulted in communicative exchange that was constrained and teachers’ work increasingly shifted toward platform management rather than a facilitator of classroom interaction (Kim & Heo, 2025; Sim, 2024). This indicates that AIDT-based teaching does not automatically guarantee communication and interaction-rich English classroom environments. Second, the findings pointed out the need to redefine teachers’ roles within AIDT-mediated EFL settings. The preservice teachers of the study realized that effective use of AIDT requires them to function as instructional designers who interpret pedagogical goals, make judgments regarding AI outputs, and coordinate AIDT features in principled ways rather than serve as English input providers or classroom managers (Kim, 2022; Lee, 2020). Third, the findings suggest that AIDT necessitates a rethinking of what constitutes a textbook. Teachers with the existence of AIDT in classroom should develop a critical technology and digital literacy stance that help them to conceptualize textbooks as flexible, dynamic and co-constructed media rather than static materials to use easily, while exercising professional agency to use them according to their understanding of learners, teaching practice, lesson goals and achievement outcomes, and teacher roles (Kim & Ahn, 2025; Shin & Kim, 2025). These perspectives collectively reveal that AIDT implementation requires more than functional mastery of technical features, but it in fact demands ethos stuff (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007) that include epistemic framing, judgment, and an ability to carefully adapt AIDT based on pedagogical decision-making.
Despite its importance as one of the few studies attempting to include AIDT for preservice teacher education within the Korean ELT discourse, this study also has limitations. The microteaching context constrained preservice teachers’ opportunities to experiment with AIDT in authentic classrooms with elementary learners and limited their use to a single AIDT platform, making comparative inquiry difficult. The short period of engagement for an only one semester period may also have limited their ability to fully understand AIDT’s long-term instructional value including data-informed adaptive instruction (Cho & Jung, 2024). Future research would benefit from longitudinal and field-based designs that include diverse AIDT platforms, actual elementary learners using AIDT, and collaboration with in-service teachers. Such approaches may also allow examination of teachers’ and learners’ affective domains and wellbeing in relation to AIDT-based instruction, which has rarely been the topic of research (Kiaer & Jeon, 2024).
Viewing the limitations as opportunities for further study, this study contributes to the recent growing body of research on AIDT in Korean ELT by foregrounding preservice teachers’ perspectives and highlighting both the pedagogical potential and challenges of AIDT-driven teaching. The findings highlight the importance of preparing future teachers to critically engage with emerging technologies and adapt conventional teaching practices to meet the demands and possibilities of AIDT-enhanced language learning environments. The emergence and use of AIDT also raises a renewed policy question about English teacher professionalism. It poses a question of whether future English teachers in the Korean elementary schools should be prepared as highly proficient English language users or as pedagogical AIDT designers who can skillfully operate AIDT-based TEE, which suggests a need for more policy discussion on the direction of English teacher qualification in Korean ELT as well as TEE (e.g., Lee, 2020). Taken together, these insights make it possible to begin a new discussion on the localization of AIDT integration to better respond to pedagogical priorities, linguistic realities, and sociocultural conditions of EFL discourse and ensure that AIDT serves as a transformative pedagogical medium rather than a supplementary tool. This state-driven transformation of the ELT environment and the emergence of the new technology/medium (i.e., AIDT) may provide a timely chance for Korean English education to be located at the center of global ELT discourse. In this rapidly shifting landscape and fluctuating opinions and attitudes among teachers and learners and parents, it is therefore important to set aside political orientations and continue examining the actual pedagogical use and patterns of engagement with AIDT in more closely observable classroom practice.
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