Preparing for the AI Era: AI-TPACK Levels of Pre-service English Teachers and Their Attitudes toward AI

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION, cilt.12, sa.1, ss.134-145, 2026 (Scopus)

Background. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in educational

processes, teacher education programs must prepare future teachers to meaningfully integrate

AI tools into their pedagogical practice. Despite this growing need, little is known about preservice

English teachers’ AI related pedagogical competencies, or how their attitudes toward AI

align with these competencies. Addressing this gap is essential for informing curriculum design

and professional development. This study contributes to the emerging fields of AI integration in

language teacher education. It offers timely insights into how future English language teaching

(ELT) professionals perceive and use AI, an area with limited empirical evidence.

Purpose. To investigate the artificial intelligence technological pedagogical content knowledge

(AI-TPACK) levels of pre-service English teachers and their attitudes toward AI and to examine

whether these two constructs are meaningfully related.

Method. 244 pre-service teachers in their junior or senior year from two state universities

participated in this study. The participants completed two assessment scales: the AI-TPACK and

the GenAI attitude scale. The obtained data were analysed via SPSS, and additional analysis was

performed in the R environment.

Results. The findings revealed that pre-service teachers in the ELT department reported

relatively positive perceptions across AI-TPACK dimensions and demonstrated positive attitudes

toward AI as measured by a learner-oriented GenAI attitude scale. Item-level mean scores

across AI-TPACK dimensions ranged from 3.61 to 3.88, indicating relatively similar perceptions

across the subdimensions. Notably, no significant relationship was identified between any of the

constructs of AI-TPACK and attitudes.

Conclusion. Although pre-service English teachers demonstrated positive attitudes towards

AI as a learner and relatively positive perceptions of AI-related pedagogical competence, the

absence of significant relationships between these two constructs may point to a possible

attitude-competence gap in AI integration. These findings suggest that favourable perceptions

of AI alone may not be sufficient for the development of integrated pedagogical competence.

Therefore, teacher education programs may need to provide more structured and practiceoriented

opportunities for AI integration in ELT contexts.