Collaboratively interpreting GenAI output in Chinese as an Additional Language classrooms: Creating an AI-mediated translanguaging space

Amid the ongoing integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into language education, classroom-based research on how GenAI output is taken up and made meaningful in everyday teaching and learning remains limited. This gap is particularly evident in Chinese-as-an-additional-language (CAL) classrooms in Hong Kong, where ethnic-minority students frequently rely on multilingual and multimodal resources to participate in interaction. Therefore, this study examines how an AI-mediated translanguaging space was constructed interactionally when teachers and students worked with GenAI output during CAL classroom activities. More specifically, it applies a combination of multimodal conversation analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis to classroom interactions that naturally occurred in 14 CAL lessons, involving one teacher and 15 students, which were video-recorded over two months, alongside GenAI chat logs, fieldnotes, and two semi-structured teacher interviews. The findings indicate that GenAI output became pedagogically consequential through teacher-GenAI-student interaction, specifically through two key interactional phenomena: (1) reorchestrating epistemic authority through group evaluation and (2) enabling creative re-authoring through narrative development. In these ways, GenAI output became a shared object for critical evaluation and creative reworking, contributing to the construction of an AI-mediated translanguaging space in CAL classrooms. Practical implications of the findings are also discussed.