A Self-Narrative Inquiry into GenAI-Enhanced Chinese Cultural Instruction

Despite the rapid proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in language education, longitudinal practitioner-centred accounts of how teachers' instructional practices and professional competence evolve through sustained GenAI integration in Chinese cultural instruction remain scarce.This self-narrative inquiry examines one pre-service Chinese language teacher's six-month experience of integrating GenAI into adult Chinese cultural instruction at a university.Drawing on 11 reflective journals, pedagogical artefacts, and semi-structured interviews with three peer observer teachers and two professors specialising in Chinese cultural instruction, the study employs Riessman's (2008) thematic narrative analysis within Clandinin and Connelly's (2000) narrative inquiry framework.Findings reveal a developmental trajectory across three qualitatively distinct phases: designing for novelty, designing for function, and designing for integration.Concurrently, the teacher's role evolved from tool user to tool architect, with AI literacy, in-class improvisational responsiveness to technology failure, and the conceptual repositioning of GenAI from pedagogical spectacle to invisible infrastructure developing iteratively through practice.Two design principles were inductively constructed: GenAI task design should target functions irreplaceable by lowerthreshold alternatives, and GenAI-generated content should compensate for the inaccessibility of authentic materials rather than substitute for them.This study contributes a practitioner-centred, longitudinal perspective to the underexplored intersection of GenAI integration and Chinese cultural instruction, and offers empirically grounded design suggestions for instructional practice.