A Phenomenological Investigation of EAP Teacher Identity in the Age of AI
The 7th International English for Specific Purposes Conference, Ankara, Türkiye, 6 - 07 Kasım 2026, ss.14, (Özet Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: Ankara
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.14
- TED Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
The growing presence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in higher education continues to transform English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction, leading practitioners to reconsider their professional roles and revisit their pedagogical decision-making processes. While a growing body of research has explored teachers’ GenAI perceptions and uses, how they experience these changes in relation to their professional identities and how they position themselves within increasingly AI-mediated instructional contexts have been studied to a lesser extent. This issue is particularly relevant to English for Academic Purposes (EAP), where questions surrounding academic writing, authorship, feedback, and assessment are closely intertwined with teachers’ pedagogical expertise. Therefore, this study explores the influence of EAP instructors’ lived experiences of GenAI on their professional identities and positioning. Adopting an interpretative phenomenological approach (Smith et al., 2009), the study draws on data collected from nine experienced EAP instructors at a private university in Türkiye through semi-structured interviews, vignette-based elicitation involving specific AI-use scenarios, and participant-generated visuals (Xu & Tan, 2024) depicting their conceptualizations of GenAI in EAP. Findings point to key interrelated experiential themes. First, EAP instructors generally perceived GenAI as a useful pedagogical resource while highlighting the need to evaluate and adapt outputs. Similarly, they positioned themselves as conditional collaborators with AI, negotiating the scope of its use and engaging with it selectively. In addition, they expressed recurrent concerns about protecting the nature of learning and authorship in AI-mediated writing and assessment. Finally, although instructors experienced demoralization and a reduced sense of instructional value, some reasserted their value through distinctively human aspects of teaching, including context-informed
and experience-based judgement and human interaction. These findings highlight the need for comprehensive, context-sensitive, and up-to-date AI literacy training and institutional guidance in order to support the instructors’ professional agency and help them adapt to an increasingly AI-mediated academic landscape.