Speaker
Description
The capabilities and practical applications of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have advanced rapidly over recent years (Heift & Schulze, 2015). Foreign language education has already been dramatically impacted by these developments, as learners gain access to increasingly powerful AI tools capable not only of improving grammar and vocabulary choices in academic writing, but also of generating highly coherent and cohesive original written texts (Godwin-Jones, 2022). Such tools may hold great potential for learning (Cai et al., 2023), but they also pose an array of complex new problems on matters of pedagogical effectiveness and academic integrity (Chomsky, 2023).
Understanding how key stakeholders use and perceive these technologies is crucial for developing effective and equitable classroom practices and also for educational policy-making, yet systematic research on these topics remains scarce. This presentation will review the key findings on language learner and teacher perceptions of and attitudes towards AI technologies, including AI-augmented machine translation tools and generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT, in the existing CALL literature. Furthermore, a work-in-progress research project on the actual use of such technologies among young adult foreign language learners in Japan for the purposes of English academic writing will also be introduced. Initial findings from a meta-analysis of the relevant existing CALL literature as well as from learner and teacher surveys will be presented. The aim of this session is to encourage constructive discussion among CALL researchers and practitioners about the potentials and the pitfalls of current and emerging AI technologies for language learning and teaching as well as to identify fruitful avenues for future collaborative research.
| Keywords | artificial intelligence (AI), learner attitudes, machine translation |
|---|
