Recent developments

A BarCamp, or unconference, is an informal online conference, in which participants are actively encouraged to share aspects of their own experience. In our case this involved 18 participants from Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Egypt, France, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Serbia and Morocco, sharing suggestions on how to use artificial intelligence in teaching and insights from their experimentations. This enabled us to broaden our perspectives with voices from real-life classrooms, and also brought out the commonalities that educators around the world face when working with artificial intelligence to enrich their teaching practice. 

Although our professional experience and the results of the survey we conducted had already provided us with some indication of the range of AI tools that are available to language teachers, we were nevertheless impressed by the diversity of applications that BarCamp participants mentioned, including tools that had been created for language education, existing applications that had been augmented with AI technology, as well as more generic tools that were re-purposed for teaching. Some of the resources mentioned are listed in the table below:

Table 1. AI resources used in language education  

The BarCamp participants also had multiple interesting insights to share regarding the use of the technology. For instance, it was pointed out that while students are often motivated by the game-like qualities of artificial intelligence, there is also a risk that this might undermine the face validity of language lessons. To counteract this, it was suggested that teachers can use AI applications in the context of Project Based Learning, as this would make students feel accountable for their output. Several participants mentioned the topic of hallucinations (inaccurate output produced by text generators), and it was suggested that teachers can address this concern by using authentic materials as starting points which can then be modified, as opposed to relying on AI-generated text. A recurring theme in several presentations was the challenge of writing useful prompts; while this can be seen as a challenge, for teachers and learners alike, it can also be a learning opportunity, if teachers can approach prompt writing as a learning outcome that students should work towards. Several teachers also noted that AI technology is best used not as a substitute to existing learning routines, but as an added component in tried-and-tested practices: for instance, learners can use an application to generate feedback on texts that they (or their classmates) produced, and then consolidate all these suggestions in DOs and DON’Ts lists, which they can then present in a variety of formats, using AI to support them. 

What is, however, the most important insight from this event was that teachers in very diverse settings are embracing the challenges of working with AI in order to broaden the horizon of what is possible in their teaching, and that —in the process of doing so with different tools, for different ages, in different contexts— they are discovering similar opportunities and encountering similar concerts. This creates a need for spaces, such as the BarCamp we organised, where teachers and teacher educators can share their experiences, and from where new pedagogical insights can emerge.

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