Analyzing the Lecturers' perception of Generative AI in developing English writing skill

This qualitative phenomenological study examines how English lecturers at UIN Ar-Raniry Banda Aceh perceive the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, in developing students' writing skills, and identifies the challenges they face integrating these tools into instruction and assessment, a topic underexplored from the vantage point of lecturers within Indonesian Islamic higher education. Guided by Moustakas's (1994)transcendental phenomenological design and interpreted through the Technology Acceptance Model, the TPACK framework, and Vygotskian scaffolding theory, the study drew on semi-structured interviews with three purposively selected lecturers with direct experience teaching writing and employing Generative AI, analyzed via Moustakas's six-step procedure.Findings reveal that lecturers regard Generative AI as a conditionally beneficial, supplementary tool rather than a substitute for genuine writing effort, crediting it with fostering gains in grammatical accuracy, lexical range, textual organization, idea generation, and learner confidence. Simultaneously, they grapple with an array of pedagogical challenges, including preserving students' independent writing capacity, mitigating over-reliance, safeguarding academic integrity, and reorienting assessment toward process rather than product, compounded by technical constraints such as inequitable access to devices and connectivity and the inconsistent reliability of AI-generated output. The study concludes that lecturers function as reflective practitioners who deliberately calibrate the boundaries of AI integration in line with their pedagogical convictions, treating emergent challenges as surmountable through clearer institutional guidelines and deliberate task design. Although context-bound and not statistically generalizable, these findings extend TAM, TPACK, and scaffolding theory into an underrepresented setting, with implications for lecturers, curriculum developers, and policymakers.