Becoming a teacher in the era of AI: A multiple-case study of pre-service teachers’ investment in AI-facilitated learning-to-teach practices

Language learning and teaching research explores the affordances and constraints of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools and learners' and teachers' AI literacy. However, little attention has been directed to teachers' use of such tools and their implications for the development of GenAI literacies as diverse, historically, and culturally variable practices involving AI tools, especially pre-service teachers (PSTs) in the second language (L2) context. Based on an exploratory multiple-case study of five undergraduate PSTs in Hong Kong, this paper adopts the model of L2 investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015) to address this need by posing three question: 1. What are the GenAI literacies that PSTs invest in as they learn to teach? 2. What are the perceived affordances and constraints of GenAI tools in their learning-to-teach practices? 3. To what extent do their identity and access to resources shape these literacies? Data was collected from a survey, interviews, and observations of participants' GenAI use, and triangulated using content analysis. Findings reveal how PSTs invest in their English and pedagogy learner, bilingual writer, and teacher identities that intertwine with their identities as users of various GenAI tools in GenAI-empowered spaces as ideological sites that shaped PSTs' dispositions and positioning. Recognizing how PSTs deploy multiple resources to invest in contrasting GenAI literacies, this study underscores the need for the language classroom to integrate GenAI literacies instruction that enables a critical awareness of how GenAI tools operate. Copyright © 2025 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.