IMAGE-GENERATING AI IN ELT MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT: HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS AND SUPPORT NEEDS

This qualitative study investigates how in-service public high school English language teachers perceive role and usefulness of image generation AI tools in their lesson material development and what challenges they identify support needs when integrating image generation AI tools into their lesson material development practices. The research was conducted through semi-structured interviews with four female ELT teachers who worked at a Turkish public high school using a seven-question protocol. The research data underwent Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) which used inductive data-driven coding methods to analyze the information. Iterative coding and constant comparison were also performed using theory-based techniques for improvement. The research findings indicate that teachers employed image generation to develop customized educational content which they used to create visual learning materials and multi-media educational activities for their students. The participants stressed that teachers need to keep their teaching authority because it helps students maintain their creative abilities and AI systems must operate based on teacher instructions. Teachers described their standard "trust work" which includes three tasks to verify content diversity, age appropriateness and to detect between real and fake images. Teachers also pointed to workload issues, time-to-learn problems and their restricted ability to write AI prompts, their limited resource access and their uncertainty about institutional professional development programs’ efficiency. Teachers asked for training that focuses on practical applications and complete ethical and policy guidelines to help them use classroom technology properly.