University Lecturers’ Skills, Readiness, and Attitudes Toward AI in Teaching Kiswahili: Evidence from Dar es Salaam

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the teaching of Kiswahili within tertiary education institutions in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and to explore its potential as a transformative tool for enhancing language instruction. Specifically, the study sought to determine the extent to which Kiswahili lecturers possess the competencies required to incorporate AI‑based tools into their teaching practices and to assess their attitudes toward the adoption of AI in Kiswahili pedagogy. Guided by Bandura’s social learning theory (Khodamoradi, 2015) and Dewey’s functionalist perspective (Dewey & Hall, 2018), the study employed a descriptive research design to address the research questions on examining the specific AI‑related skills lecturers and students currently possess and identifying existing gaps, their psychological and institutional readiness to adopt AI tools in their instructional practices, and the attitudes they hold toward AI as a transformative tool for teaching Kiswahili. Purposive sampling was used to select universities available in Dar es Salaam City, both public and private, that offer Kiswahili programmes, and data were collected from 120 lecturers through questionnaires, focus group discussions, interviews, and classroom observations. The findings revealed that although awareness of AI technologies such as Praat Stanza, SpaCy morphological models, Polyglot, Kiswahili NLP parsers, and Speech analyser is growing, their actual use in Kiswahili instruction remains limited due to inadequate training, infrastructural constraints, and uncertainty about pedagogical integration. The study contributes to emerging scholarship on AI in African higher education and offers practical insights for lecturers, teacher‑training institutions, and curriculum developers on how AI can be effectively incorporated to enrich Kiswahili teaching and learning in tertiary settings.