VietTESOL International Convention 2026

Vietnamese university English teachers are navigating two converging transformations: the national repositioning of English from a foreign to a second language, and the rapid penetration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into higher education. Together, these forces are repositioning not only the language itself but also the teachers who profess it. Tasks once considered constitutive of language teaching expertise — modelling target-language production, correcting learner output, mediating between languages — are increasingly performed by accessible AI systems. Yet how teachers experience and respond to this perceived shift remains under-researched, with dominant scholarship focusing on AI tools and teacher attitudes rather than on the deeper psychological work of professional reconfiguration.
This study investigates how English teachers at a Vietnamese private university make sense of changes in their professional expertise during this double transition. Drawing on the concepts of professional grief, emotional labour in TESOL, and identity-in-practice, the study adopts Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis as its methodological frame. Data were generated through one in-depth semi-structured interview and three structured written reflections, prompted at intervals to elicit retrospective, present, and prospective accounts of professional experience. Twelve teachers were purposively selected to reflect variation in seniority and contract status within a single institutional context.
Emerging findings point to four interrelated dimensions of perceived loss: epistemic (whose knowledge counts now?), authority-related (who is the language expert in this classroom?), relational (how does AI mediation reshape teacher-student bonds?), and vocational (what remains uniquely worth teaching?). Participants also articulate tentative attempts at expertise reconfiguration, suggesting that professional becoming, rather than resistance or compliance, is the central analytic problem. The study contributes a psychologically informed, phenomenologically grounded perspective to conversations about teacher development and AI integration in Vietnamese higher education.