Abstract:

The use of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) chatbots has become a common practice in higher education. Most of the students use AI tools inside and outside the classroom for their assignments on a regular basis. Secondary teacher education in Spain entails enrolling an MA which enables graduate students to become qualified practitioners upon its completion.

This paper gives account of the self-perceived behaviours of a group of thirty-six (n=36) pre-service English as a foreign language secondary school teachers (PSTs) in Spain. A mixed-methods approach was conducted. Quantitative data were collected from a questionnaire on practices with the gen AI tools in their writing tasks and the frequency with which they used it for. Qualitative data were obtained from participants’ responses to open-ended questions about the AI tools they used, what they used them for and which aspects of their writing skills they thought AI tools would be more beneficial.

The findings indicate that PSTs made a frequent use of AI tools, particularly ChatGPT. They used it for a very diverse range of aspects of their writing process: from idea generation to spelling correction. Thematic analysis of open-ended responses revealed several perceived benefits, the most frequently declared were corrective feedback on surface-level aspects, which diverges with the quantitative data, and the support on text meaning, particularly on organising ideas and paraphrasing when they wrote academic texts.

Keywords:

Gen AI, Pre-service teacher education, writing skills, perceptions, EFL.