GenAI as a Catalyst: The development of language teachers' GenAI Literacy and Multicultural/Multilingual Competence

The increasing integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in English language teaching (ELT) calls for an immediate and thorough response from language teachers (Wang et al., 2024). The affordance of GenAI, with its disruptive nature, requires language teachers to not only understand the functions of these tools but also actively engage with them in practices and develop their digital literacies and relevant competencies. Employing an exploratory qualitative approach, the study explores how ten English language instructors at a Chinese university integrate different GenAI tools in language teaching and develop their GenAI literacy and multicultural/multilingual competence through lesson study. Data collected includes indepth interviews, observations of classroom teaching and collaborative lesson preparation/reflection sessions, and supporting documents. The study reveals the development of teachers’ GenAI literacy in the community and highlights the pedagogical and contextual challenges of engaging GenAI in ELT classrooms and the strategies teachers use to reconcile them. We argue that while GenAI literacy adds to teachers’ knowledge and skill sets, language teachers’ core competencies, including multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal awareness, are integral to good digital literacy practices. Our study contributes to the reconceptualization of teachers’ digital literacy and informs policymakers and teacher trainers to develop tailor-made professional development programmes for language teachers in the era of AI and globalization.