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Description
This article is an investigation into the challenges encountered by third-year Vietnamese EFL students in English Literature courses and an evaluation of a ChatGPT-assisted pedagogical framework to address such challenges. From the needs analysis of the 122 students at HUFLIT and the pilot program using texts from Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Bronte), the challenges that were identified were linguistic intricacy, cultural unfamiliarity, and procedural uncertainty in reading and analyzing texts. These challenges were not solely attributable to language proficiency but were inherent in literary analysis itself, even among students operating at the B2 and C1 levels. The framework is an eight-step framework that implemented Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development by alternating between AI-assisted and non-AI-assisted activities such as vocabulary analysis, cultural analysis, and formative feedback in analyzing texts and creating written analyses. The pilot showed promising results: 88.5% of students showed increased confidence levels through a survey, and the average rating of the framework’s components was above 4.00 on a 5-point scale. This article is a contribution to the field as it presents a framework that is both practical and theoretically sound and can be used by EFL teachers, curriculum developers and policymakers in Vietnam and other parts of the region.
Keywords: Generative AI in EFL education; literature instruction; close reading; rubric-based assessment; Vietnamese tertiary EFL.
