Language Teaching Research Quarterly

The rapid advancement of generative AI, along with other digital technologies, is drastically changing the needs of language learning students and teachers. This classroom-based exploratory study focused on pre-service language teachers in a professional development program and investigated their perceptions of ChatGPT’s affordances, the competencies necessary to use ChatGPT effectively, and how they incorporate these affordances into their pedagogical task designs to foster those competencies, specifically in the context of academic writing. The study found that the pre-service teachers became less positive about ChatGPT’s affordances after gaining more experience using it in their academic writing. The necessary competencies that they identified showed different patterns according to their own writing proficiency; those with lower proficiency primarily focused on evaluative competencies (cognitively higher-level competencies), whereas those with higher writing proficiency expressed more holistic views encompassing various levels of competencies, including basic language skills. However, the pre-service teachers, regardless of their proficiency levels, appeared to encounter difficulty transitioning from viewing the use of ChatGPT from a student’s perspective to a teacher’s perspective. Their pedagogical task designs reflected challenges in using ChatGPT for their students’ learning, rather than in learning, which highlighted the need for fostering such pedagogical strategies in professional development programs.