Ngo Cong-Lem

As generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools become increasingly embedded in academic writing practices, questions of authorship, integrity, and accountability require new assessment approaches. This study examines teacher-led interviews as a mediational assessment practice, informed by an integrative cultural–historical activity theory (iCHAT) perspective that emphasizes how reasoning, responsibility, and authorship develop through guided social interaction. Teacher-led interviews were designed to prompt students to explain and justify their research writing decisions, including how they engaged with GenAI support. Reflection data were collected from 24 Master’s-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, who were asked to participate in short teacher-led interviews about their research proposal submissions as part of the unit assessment. Thematic analysis indicates that the interviews supported the emergence of an ethical orientation toward academic work, expressed through cognitive, emotional, and agentive developments. Students engaged more critically with ideas and AI-generated suggestions (cognitive), negotiated feelings of anxiety, fairness, and recognition (emotional), and adopted more proactive and self-regulated preparation strategies (agentive). These outcomes appeared to be shaped by how students experienced the interview (perezhivanie), suggesting that the interview reoriented the object and motive of the writing task from producing text to being able to account for one’s reasoning and decisions. The study proposes a cultural-historical framework conceptualizing teacher-led interviews as a mediational space where dialogic accountability supports reflective, ethical, and principled engagement with GenAI. Implications highlight the need for assessment practices that cultivate development through guided explanation rather than rely solely on detection or surveillance.

As generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools become increasingly embedded in academic writing practices, questions of authorship, integrity, and accountability require new assessment approaches. This study examines teacher-led interviews as a mediational assessment practice, informed by an integrative cultural–historical activity theory (iCHAT) perspective that emphasizes how reasoning, responsibility, and authorship develop through guided social interaction. Teacher-led interviews were designed to prompt students to explain and justify their research writing decisions, including how they engaged with GenAI support. Reflection data were collected from 24 Master’s-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, who were asked to participate in short teacher-led interviews about their research proposal submissions as part of the unit assessment. Thematic analysis indicates that the interviews supported the emergence of an ethical orientation toward academic work, expressed through cognitive, emotional, and agentive developments. Students engaged more critically with ideas and AI-generated suggestions (cognitive), negotiated feelings of anxiety, fairness, and recognition (emotional), and adopted more proactive and self-regulated preparation strategies (agentive). These outcomes appeared to be shaped by how students experienced the interview (perezhivanie), suggesting that the interview reoriented the object and motive of the writing task from producing text to being able to account for one’s reasoning and decisions. The study proposes a cultural-historical framework conceptualizing teacher-led interviews as a mediational space where dialogic accountability supports reflective, ethical, and principled engagement with GenAI. Implications highlight the need for assessment practices that cultivate development through guided explanation rather than rely solely on detection or surveillance.

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (VST) has been increasingly utilised as an effective framework to account for the role of emotions in learning and development. Yet, within VST, emotion has neither been systemically theorised nor investigated. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a theoretical discussion of Vygotsky’s perspective on emotion and its relation to cognition. Employing a content analysis approach, three of Vygotsky’s key texts on emotions were closely read and analysed with emerging themes grouped into a system of interrelated theoretical tenets. The insights gained from this paper benefit scholars who are interested in understanding and researching emotions from a VST perspective as well as provide important implications for educational practices.

In recent decades, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (VST) has become particularly influential in the fields of education and educational psychology. Perezhivanie is an important concept in VST that stipulates a relative influence of environment on a person’s psychological development depending on their age or stage of development. However, perezhivanie has been differentially interpreted and applied in previous literature to suit the purposes of domain-specific research. The lack of a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the concept can undermine research findings and their implications for educational practices. Drawing on a content analysis of Vygotsky’s key texts on perezhivanie, this paper provides a much-needed theoretical discussion that unpacks comprehensively the theoretical content of perezhivanie and the methodological principles guiding its application. The findings revealed that conceptually, perezhivanie can be defined as: (a) a theoretical relation between an individual and their environment, (b) an abstract experience of or attitude towards a life situation and (c) a concrete lived experience of an event within that situation. Four major discernible components of an individual’s perezhivanie include the environmental factor, personal characteristics mobilised, refraction prism and psychological influences. Five key methodological principles were conceived to assist the employment of perezhivanie in educational/psychological research: (1) utilising a perezhivanie as a unit of analysis, (2) analysing perezhivanie at different levels, (3) accounting for the perspective of the individual involved, (4) constructing the refraction prism and (5) determining the major personal characteristics mobilised in the perezhivanie. Implications for educational and research practices are then discussed.

At the social turn in education, Vygotsky's cultural-historical/sociocultural theory (VST) has become particularly influential. There are other cultural-historical traditions associated with VST, including Leontiev's and Engeström's versions of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). These approaches are frequently conflated, resulting in confusion that can be consequential in interpreting educational research findings. Unravelling these frameworks is thus an important and urgent task. In addressing this gap, the paper first provides an overview of the origins and fundamental tenets of these cultural-historical perspectives, followed by a critical evaluation of and comparison among them. Implications for utilising these cultural-historical traditions are discussed.

Activity theory has long been an influential framework in the field of education. However, its theoretical concepts are not easily grasped by scholars, mainly due to difficulties in translation from the original Russian works, the complexity of these concepts and multiple versions embedded within the tradition. The two major approaches within activity theory were established by Leontiev and another version proposed later by Engeström, and they have often been confused and conflated together in the literature. This paper provides a much-needed theoretical comparison between these approaches in regard to the field of education. The criteria for comparison involve their theoretical foundations, central phenomena of interest, key theoretical concepts, units of analysis and explanatory mechanisms. Insights from this paper contribute to establishing a more refined understanding of activity theory and its variants, which in turn allows researchers to make more informed decisions when selecting and using these frameworks. Implications for practical research practices are discussed with examples from the area of teacher professional development.