The Future of Education

The rapid growth of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) has challenged conventional language teaching and triggered language teachers’ anxieties about learning and being replaced by AI. With its limitless potential in assisting language teaching, CAI threatens the professions of language teachers, who, therefore, are faced with the dilemma of denying or accepting the CAI education intended for their future career development. The study thus aims to explore the effect of CAI anxiety, particularly those concerned with learning and job replacement, on language teachers’ intention to receive CAI education. Based on the AI anxiety theory and motivation theory, the study constructs an integrated model to predict the power of CAI anxiety in arousing language teachers’ intention to learn CAI through the mediation of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Besides, the study also investigates the role of anthropomorphism in moderating the effect of CAI anxiety on language teachers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Self-administered questionnaires designed for the survey include measurement items developed from previous studies (Wang and Wang, 2022; Wang et al., 2022; Pillai and Sivathuanu, 2020). The study takes snowball sampling on social media platforms in China by first inviting a few participants (language teachers) and requesting them to further distribute the questionnaires. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is adopted to analyze the data because it is commonly used in questionnaires and has also been previously used in similar studies (Wang et al., 2022). The study contributes to the knowledge of the effect of psycho-emotional factors on language teachers’ professional development by exploring the effect of CAI-related learning and job replacement anxiety on language teachers’ learning intention. Besides, the study illuminates the complex relations between anxiety, motivation, learning intention, and anthropomorphism among language teachers, which lends theoretical reference to future researchers. Practically, the study informs policymakers of the necessity to carry out CAI education for language teachers. Since the widespread adoption of CAI is still far in sight, the study takes a closer perspective by investigating the immediate need to learn CAI among language teachers, which assists policy-makers in understanding teachers’ psycho-emotional well-being and facilitating their professional development.