Novel education has emphasized the importance of ‘dialogic reading,’ wherein learners actively engage with texts to construct meaning through interactive processes. However, practical classroom environments have faced limitations in providing suff...
Novel education has emphasized the importance of ‘dialogic reading,’ wherein learners actively engage with texts to construct meaning through interactive processes. However, practical classroom environments have faced limitations in providing sufficient dialogic experiences for individual learners due to constraints in time and human resources. Recent rapid advancements in artificial intelligence technology present new possibilities for addressing these limitations. Generative AI chatbots, in particular, have been extensively utilized in educational research due to their capacity to enable learners to engage in sustained and individualized dialogues about texts. Nevertheless, AI lacks autonomous readership and possesses inherent technical limitations, necessitating rigorous theoretical and pedagogical reconceptualization before its adoption as a mediating element in dialogic reading.
Accordingly, this study positions AI chatbots as auxiliary non-human actants in novel education and theoretically establishes the concept of ‘dialogic novel reading with AI chatbots’, thereby attempting to reconceptualize the agents and interactional structures of reading practices. The study establishes the ultimate goal of novel reading as a process oriented toward deepening and expanding understanding, adopting Gadamer’s concept of fusion of horizons, which emphasizes interpretive transformation and integration, as its theoretical foundation. Additionally, it examines the operational principles through which dialogic experiences reveal readers’ pre-understanding and reconstruct meaning through confrontation and negotiation with texts. Furthermore, it conceptualizes AI chatbots not merely as tools that assist readers’ interpretations but as mediators that facilitate and transform meaning. Based on these discussions, this study defines ‘dialogic novel reading with AI chatbots’ as a collaborative meaning-construction activity wherein readers recognize AI chatbots as cognitive and social actors during novel reading, explore, construct, and expand meaning through real-time interaction, and critically adjust and integrate their interpretations. This concept maintains the core structures of traditional dialogic reading while demonstrating distinctiveness in producing qualitative transformations in reader experience due to the generative performativity, social presence, repeatability and sustainability, and distributed cognition characteristic of generative AI chatbots.
To implement these conceptual discussions in educational settings, this study adopted the Design and Development Research methodology. Through literature review, needs analysis, and case study analysis, the study derived design principles and detailed guidelines for AI chatbots supporting dialogic novel reading, and developed a chatbot operating according to the PEER sequence based on large language models. Subsequently, field applications were conducted with middle and high school students using Park Seo-ryeon’s “Me, Me, Madeleine” and Hwang Sun-won’s “The Star,” collecting dialogue logs, reading journals, and reflection diaries for qualitative and quantitative analysis. Analysis results revealed that generative AI chatbots facilitated interpretive adjustment and elaboration by explicating learners’ pre-understanding and confronting it with textual evidence, while promoting meaning exploration grounded in specific textual support. In some cases, accumulated interactions enabled learners to reach stages of integrated understanding of texts’ complex meanings. Conversely, limitations including technical errors, deepening cognitive dependency on AI, and potential homogenization of interpretations were also identified, suggesting that AI chatbot utilization must be coupled with active teacher mediation and learners’ critical literacy competencies.
This study holds educational significance in establishing the concept of ‘dialogic novel reading with AI chatbots’ and systematically elucidating its operational principles and mediating structures. Particularly, by positioning AI as an auxiliary actor in dialogic reading, the study extends the dialogue concept discussed in traditional novel reading education into AI-utilization contexts and concretizes theoretical and practical discussions regarding AI-based novel education. This carries significance in expanding the research horizons of Korean language arts and literature education, where discussions on the educational application of generative AI have been relatively limited. Furthermore, the introduction of AI as an auxiliary actor in this study does not signify replacement or weakening of interpretive communication among human actors in classrooms; rather, it suggests that when learners’ deepened interpretations through dialogue with AI chatbots are linked to conversations with peer learners and teachers, this can function as an educational approach that complements and strengthens existing dialogic novel reading.