BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1616458
This article is part of the Research TopicTeaching and Assessing with AI: Teaching Ideas, Research, and ReflectionsView all 14 articles
RESEARCH AI -Navigating the Contradictions of AI in Bilingual Education: Moving in and Between Critiquing Standardized AI English and Developing Creative AI Possibilities
Provisionally accepted
Edward Rivero1*
Peng Yin2- 1Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, United States
- 2University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
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This study examines bilingual pre-service teachers' (PSTs) perceptions and reflections on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in relation to their own biliteracy and pedagogical development. Grounded in a critical language and sociocultural literacy framework, this paper features highlights from a larger research project that examines how PSTs leverage AI to develop academic literacies, create multimodal texts, and design AI-mediated lesson plans in bilingual classrooms. The study participants consist of 13 PSTs from Mandarin (8) and Spanish (5) speaking backgrounds, who were enrolled in a graduate-level teacher preparation course. For this study, we focused on a specific segment of data drawn from a reflective journal activity completed by participants. This reflective journal activity involved i) reflecting on the affordances and constraints of AI for their own academic literacy development, ii) designing and evaluating AI-generated multimodal texts for bilingual learners, and iii) engaging in conversations with AI about bilingual education. Findings reveal that PSTs'engagement with AI in their biliteracy and pedagogical development, is characterized by tensions between its potential to support culturally responsive learning and its constraints undergirded by the ideologies of standardized English and monolingualism. The study concludes by highlighting its pedagogical implications for bilingual teacher education at the tertiary level.
Keywords: Bilingual education (BE), artificial intelligence, Standardized English, creativity, pre-service & teacher education, Critical approaches
Received: 22 Apr 2025; Accepted: 13 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rivero and Yin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Edward Rivero, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, United States
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