From Practice to Perspective: Korean Preservice Teachers Reflecting on Their Experience With AIDT

As AIDT (Artificial Intelligence Digital Textbook) has become an emerging trend in Korean educational context that prompts demands for preservice teacher training, this study explores how Korean preservice teachers engaged with AIDT through a semester-long course that covered theoretical learning and microteaching practice. Drawing on video-recorded microteaching data, written reflections, and post-teaching discussion, the study examines how AIDT was integrated into microteaching practice and how preservice teachers perceived its pedagogical affordances and constraints. The analysis shows classroom practices are frequently centered on speaking functions, automated assessment routines, and highly structured task sequences, yet excessive dependence on AIDT often limited spontaneous and meaningful interaction and reduced teacher roles to the operation of an AIDT platform. The strong preference for AIDT reshaped classroom behavior by narrowing teachers’ movement and contributing to passive learner participation. In terms of perceptions, participants questioned the alignment of AIDT with Korea’s policy of teaching English in English and expressed doubts about the restricted AI functionality of the current AIDT. They also reconsidered the textbook as a dynamic and data-driven environment that challenges conventional instructional authority and calls for sustained pedagogical reflection. Future research should examine how improved AIDT designs may promote more adaptive and interaction-oriented instructional models.