OAILL podcast: To AI or not to AI – Emily M. Bender and Andreas Horn

Phil and I are exploring two contrasting? or complementary? perspectives on AI in education by Andreas Horn and Emily M. Bender. How can language educators respond thoughtfully to a technology that is already shaping education. The two texts by Bender and Horn are contributions to a UNESCO (2025) booklet: AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions.

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In eigener Sache: Panta Rhei Enterprise and Opening AI for Language Learning

Things are going well. Really well. ... These are sentences one does not hear very often these days. Yet, here in this blog they ring true. And for that I am grateful. Grateful to you. To you the readers. To you the listeners. Thank you. And let me explain. Photo by Niklas Jeromin on Pexels.com

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OAILL podcast: OAILL in Hong Kong

Podcasts are virtual, right? Phil Hubbard and I were not really in Hong Kong. We were in Hong Kong virtually. We were there virtually, and Glenn Stockwell was there really. Time difference and all. In our podcast episode AI and professional development according to Glenn, Phil had warned that we were coming for him. 😉 In episode 005, Phil and I were talking about Glenn's book chapter…

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Virtual Professional Learning Day (November 2026) - Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers (CASLT)

Join CASLT’s first themed Virtual PL Day to connect, collaborate, and explore AI in language education together.

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Beyond AI (7): The Imitation Game (part 4) Textual analysis

Natural language processing: In 1990 after having completed my teacher training, I stayed at the university for my doctoral studies. And soon after the Deutschmark came to East Germany on July 1, 1990, I bought a personal computer (Figure 10) and found some software that were not yet in use at the Pädagogische Hochschule Leipzig, because the computers had neither been donated nor delivered yet.

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Beyond AI (6): The Imitation Game (part 3) Going digital

Technology and language teaching — So far, I have mainly talked about the language lab and the TV, which were a big part of my own language learning. In my teacher training, the technologies I had learnt about and was tested on in the late 1980s were the slide projector, overhead projector, record player, and a few others. It was only when I began to teach at the Manchester Metropolitan University in England that I wanted to use computers in language teaching.

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AI, metaphors and control

In the early 2000s, during the dramatic but now almost forgotten outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle, I wrote about war metaphors and the issue of projecting control over an ‘out of …

makingsciencepublic.com

Beyond AI (5): The Imitation Game (part 2) Learning through teaching

I continued my language learning at the teacher training college (Pädagogische Hochschule) in at least one Russian language class a day for six days a week in groups of six students and during the third year abroad in Kaluga, a city 200km south of Moscow, at the Pedagogical Institute there. My other classes in teacher education were in phonetics/phonology, morphology, lexicology, syntax, text linguistics, history of the language, for both German and Russian, always in this – structuralist – order, each for one semester,

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Obviously, you don’t need to be sorry

Six months. I looked it up. The last text before this early beginning of a text is from late January. Nothing in-between. I wrote. Just not here. Just not in the morning. I wrote at work. Emails and notes. I worked on a lengthy book chapter.  Which I now have to shorten. That’s what the editor said.  And also ten scripts.

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Beyond AI (4): The Imitation Game (part 1): Instructed language learning

My language learning began early. I was nine years old and started grade 3 in a special class with the extended teaching of Russian (Wikipedia Contributors, 2026e). My peers in other classes would only begin to learn Russian, as an obligatory subject in East Germany, in grade 5. Before that I had not encountered another language but what they called my mother tongue.

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Beyond AI (3): The Imitation Game – or – Language, learning, and computers in the mist of time

Figure 1: Part of an HSPG (linguistic) sign After outlining the qualitative research method of narrative autoethnography and introducing the research data I used, it is time to begin the story. An autoethnographic narrative can follow a chronological or episodic structure. Since each of the three parts of my narrative are more episodic, in that they address themes that are important for the intersection of AI and language education and relevant for teacher education, the overarching chronology is presented here:

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Beyond AI (2): Why and how I employ autoethnography …

This is an excerpt from an early draft of a book chapter. The book will be about language teacher education and GenAI. I am posting these in smaller (mostly) self-contained posts. The posts are numbered consecutively. After they will have all come out, I will link them with each other. Narrative autoethnography “Ethnography is the study of social interactions, behaviours, and perceptions that occur within groups, teams, organisations, and communities” (Reeves et al., 2008, p.

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Beyond AI (1): Looking back to move forward

We are starting with the Akan[1] word Sankofa, which means ‘to return, go, and get’ and symbolizes the taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present to make the future better through the benevolent use of knowledge (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). The concept of Sankofa has also been adopted in North America and elsewhere. In our context, understanding the past of language learning with technology, of language teaching methods and approaches, and of research and development in artificial intelligence (AI) helps language teachers to make sense of today’s generative AI (GenAI) technologies and their impact on the future of language education, if we shape teacher education now.

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The forgotten interview

Sometimes I forget things ... forget things I did ... forget I did something. Occasionally, I post videos and webpages that I found. Some of these resources, some of my memories have something to do with GenAI or AI in general, others don't. This one doesn't. It looks like a contradiction in terms: a written interview (which I completely forgot) on an…

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OAILL podcast: TESOL goes AI

In this podcast episode, Phil tells Mat about his adventures at the TESOL 2026 Convention in Salt Lake City, March 24-27. Phil talked with exhibitors and attended as many AI-focused presentations, panels, and posters as he could to get a sense of how AI, especially GenAI, is being presented by and to professional English language teachers. Here I will just mention one presentation, about which Phil spoke highly:

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OAILL podcast: AI and professional development according to Glenn

Finally ... Mat and Phil left their cocoon, you might say. In the first episodes of their podcast, they talked about their own work. Now they are venturing out. This is still on professional development in the context of GenAI, but now it is someone else's perspective. Phil and Mat talk to Glenn Stockwell about his book chapter on "

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Welcome to Sustained Integrated Professional Development (SIPD) for GenAI

You are welcome. In 2025, Phil Hubbard and I wrote an open-access position paper on – what we call – Sustained Integrated Professional Development (SIPD) for GenAI. In that article, we outline ten knowledge and skill areas, which I also discussed here in the blog and about which we spoke in our podcast, and seven principles of SIPD.

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GenAI — what do I need to learn?

Let's use two comparisons: 1 — a jackhammer; 2 — a modern electric car. So, if a GenAI tool is like a jackhammer, what would you do? It might be advisable to learn to use hammer and chisel first. And before that, just learn to use the hammer. Develop your skills so that you get done what needs doing and so that you don't injure yourself ...

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The Oral History Project

That's what we called it. The Oral History Project. We recruited 126 immigrants to Canada from German-speaking central Europe, conducted hour-long interviews about their life, transcribed and annotated the entire corpus, and condensed their individual stories and the different histories into 14 book chapters. Schulze, Mathias, Grit Liebscher, and Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach (Eds.) (2022) Germans of Waterloo Region

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Language Learning with GenAI: Bridging the gap OR Burning the bridge

What impact will Generative AI have on language learning? I talked about this for an hour last summer, using a personal angle. The methodology I employed is called 'autoethnographic study'. I began by constructing a narrative of my professional life as it pertains to language learning, teaching, and technology. I tried to pick the parts that informed and still inform my thinking about the rapidly evolving GenAI technologies.

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Ai, ai, ai, … where did all the languages go?

By training, I am teacher of German and Russian. Starting in 1986 as a student teacher, I have taught German. First, to kids with German as their first language. Since 1991, to university students as their second language. When I started, I thought German would always be a university subject. It had not occured to me this could ever change. That worry came a few years later ...

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Thinking about AI

Hey, Friend, Still thinking about AI. Every week, when I post here, when I work on a paper or a workshop for work, when I prepare for a podcast. The post below is a little over two years old, and I thought it might be interesting to repost it. Thinking about AI. This is something I have been doing a lot…

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KI-Wettrüsten: Tech-Riesen investieren Hunderte Milliarden

Tech-Konzerne sehen in Künstlicher Intelligenz eine einmalige Chance - und wollen einander nicht das Feld überlassen. Die Folge sind beispiellose Investitionen in Rechenzentren.

wiwo.de

Computer-assisted language learning and AI

Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular the areas of natural language processing and student modeling (Heift & Schulze, 2007; Schulze, 2008), have played a role in CALL – this sub-area is commonly referred to as Intelligent CALL or ICALL – for almost 50 years. For a small group of researchers, pedagogical issues of contingent corrective feedback and learner guidance and help were often at the center of attention.

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I did not know this about GenAI …

Now I don't know whether GenAI is powerful because it could find a remote and small village, when a manual search could not. Or has it become so dominant that you can find a village in Iran only by looking far down in the search results.

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Call For Five-Year Pause on Gen AI in Schools

As generative AI tools are rapidly expanding in schools, often based on their hypothetical “potential” to enhance learning, these products are posing risks to children’s development, mental health, pr...

actionnetwork.org

Learner Agency and GenAI

Motivation is only a small part of a student's agency (Knight & Barbera, 2018). Agency plays an important role in all teaching-and-learning processes, as students are the learning subject, setting their own goals and/or accepting or rejecting goals set by others for them. Of course, students do not just determine the goals but also the paths on which they reach them.

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