Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore the potential positive and negative outcomes of the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) in education.
I follow a lot of great language teachers on Twitter and Instagram. And I also follow a robot who teaches French. Nao, a humanoid robot from Sligo, Ireland, and the Masters project of Debbie Woodward, inspired an article I wrote for schoolrubric.org. In the post, entitled “Artificial Intelligence in Education: Robots are coming for our jobs… and I’m only slightly worried”, I explore the good, the bad, and the weird of AI in education while I also ponder whether or not I’m worried about Nao taking my job.
Nao the French-teaching social robot, screenshot from Twitter twitter.com/NAORobotIRL
While that article wasn’t written specifically with language teachers in mind, it applies to any educator who is working in education today. I also think there is a fascinating tangent to explore about how AI is impacting language education specifically. If you are interested, a great article is intellias’ “Essentials of Artificial Intelligence for Language Learning” (2021). There’s also this informative article by Marcel Pikhart (2020) about how language learning apps employ AI technology. Also of note is Edwin, the AI-powered English tutor who was featured in Chatbots Magazine (isn’t the future amazing!?!) Interestingly, Edwin and his ilk have also caused some serious debate in the realm of language testing. Finally, the article “Preparing teachers for the application of AI-powered technologies in foreign language education” (2019) has an overview of all the major language-learning AI technologies. Additionally, it includes a summary of previous research findings about why language teachers are reluctant to incorporate AI into classrooms, including lack of information, experience, or motivation; struggle to integrate this technology into existing teaching practices; and fear of losing a dominant position in the classroom (p. 145). What it doesn’t include is “vague unease about technology based on watching too many Terminator movies”, which is how I’d probably have described my thoughts before writing the piece for School Rubric!
UPDATE 01/19/22: Former Lesson: Impossible podcast guest Orly Klaphotz has a really interesting Twitter thread about the use of AI in language education when it’s built on biased data.
How about you? Do you look forward to more AI in your language classrooms and/or are you slightly worried about it as well? Let me know in the comments!