Understanding Student Engagement With Chatgpt: Perspectives From Language Teachers in Serbia and Sweden

The rapid development of LLM-based tools, such as ChatGPT, has significantly transformed teaching and learning processes, by providing powerful language-processing capabilities. While ChatGPT offers valuable support in writing, summarization, and information retrieval, its unregulated use has raised concerns about academic integrity, critical thinking, and ethical considerations. This study examines teachers’ views on student engagement with ChatGPT from the perspective of language teachers in Serbia and Sweden. Through an open-ended questionnaire distributed to eight language teachers, this research explores four key areas: (1) students’ motivations for using ChatGPT, (2) perceived benefits and drawbacks, (3) ethical concerns and implications for academic integrity, and (4) the extent to which students’ real-world applications align with OpenAI’s guidelines. Thematic analysis of teachers’ responses reveals that while ChatGPT can improve research and writing skills, overreliance on the content it generates poses risks to cognitive engagement and independent learning. Moreover, concerns about plagiarism and the authenticity of student work are prominent. These findings contribute to ongoing discussions on the responsible integration of AI-based tools in education and offer insights into how language teachers deal with the related challenges and opportunities.