BEYOND TOOLS AND TUTORS: EXPLORING VIETNAMESE EFL STUDENTS’ METAPHORICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF HUMAN-AI COLLABORATION

Truong Xuan My

Abstract


This study examines the metaphors through which Vietnamese university students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) construct their collaboration with generative AI (GenAI). Public and academic discourse commonly frames GenAI as either a tool that executes instructions or a tutor that explains and corrects, yet recent evidence suggests that learners enact a wider range of relationships. Adopting an exploratory qualitative design grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the study elicited metaphors from 42 EFL students through a sentence-completion task and conducted follow-up interviews with 21 of them. Metaphors were identified using the Metaphor Identification Procedure and read along a continuum from tool to tutor to partner. Ten source metaphors were identified. The most frequent were AI as a co-pilot, a translator of thoughts, a GPS, a mirror, and a personal learning ecosystem. Grouped by relational position, tool and environment metaphors were the most common (38.1 percent), followed by guiding metaphors (26.2 percent), partner metaphors (23.8 percent), and a reflective-surface metaphor (11.9 percent). The single most frequent metaphor, the co-pilot, was a partner image, although the students who used it consistently reasserted their own authority and described a learner-led collaboration. Notably, no metaphor framed GenAI as a risk or a source of dependency, and every conceptualization was enabling in orientation. The findings bring the Vietnamese student voice to debates about human-AI collaboration and offer metaphor as a practical lens for teachers who wish to surface and reshape the assumptions students bring to AI-assisted language learning.

Keywords


conceptual metaphor, generative AI, human-AI collaboration, EFL learners, Vietnam

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejes.v13i7.6907

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