This study aims to explore the perceptions of EFL teacher educators towards AI tools, particularly Chat GPT, as a resource for developing teaching materials. The research was conducted at a prominent institution of teacher education in Vietnam, using a convergent mixed-methods design. Data were collected through a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview with 37 EFL teacher educators to assess the familiarity and ease of use and participants’ degree of acceptance of AI tools as well as their attitudes towards the potential for supporting EFL material development.
The data analysis provided teacher educators’ insightful experience in emerging AI tools and their mixed perceptions of the deployment of these AI tools in developing their teaching materials to optimise their teaching practice. The results would inform the development of timely policies and practices for the integration of AI tools in future language teaching and learning. The study also highlights the need for further research on the effectiveness and ethical considerations regarding using a variety of AI tools across the EFL contexts. The study has significant pedagogical implications for EFL teacher education programs and contributes to improving the quality compilation, adaptation and design of teaching materials and supporting language learning outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has forced the continuous adaptations of teaching and learning in the new normality, with a shift to e-learning distance education where teachers performed multiple functions (Garrison, 2009). Teaching presence contributed significantly to online courses (Wang et al., 2021) and teachers placed more emphasis on teacher-student and student-content interactions rather than student-student interactions (Le et al., 2022). However, little research has been conducted on the practices of teaching presence in e-learning and distance education, an important but under-researched area, in the context of Vietnamese higher education. Adapting Garrison (2009) as a theoretical framework, this paper presents a study into how teachers adjusted their teaching for e-learning and distance education in the new normality.
Employing a qualitative research design (Creswell & Creswell, 2017), data were collected from a semi-structured interview with teachers at a Vietnamese university. Interview transcripts were coded and analysed deductively and inductively using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Results reveal that teachers deployed a variety of teaching practices around three main categories (Garrison et al. 2000) and enacted as an agent of change associated with diverse challenges for their teaching preparation. Pedagogical implications are discussed.