Past Seminars

What stays the same when everything changes? Technological developments, in particular in AI, present us with challenging and urgent questions. However, these are often prompted by the technology, rather than by us. As a result, we may end up looking for answers to questions that are not relevant to us. In this presentation I want to bring the conversation back to where it belongs: with us teachers and our learners.
For this, I introduce the concept of Positive CALL (Reinders, forthcoming), or a values-based-approach to the use of technology that aims to enhance learner and teacher wellbeing and thriving. This is a humanistic perspective that places personal growth at the heart of our conversations about technology and that fosters educational sustainability.
At a practical level, I present ways in which teachers can (help their learners to) take a more constructive and agentic approach to technology. I give examples of ways in which technology has served the educational needs and goals of communities, not the other way around. I show everyday strategies that can help us develop digital wellbeing and demonstrate how teachers can exert leadership to maintain control over their professional identity and aspirations. The aim of the presentation is to imagine new, human-centred opportunities for the role of technology in education.

The sudden appearance of Generative AI has precipitated a panic among some educators while prompting qualified enthusiasm from others. Under this umbrella term are a range of technologies for the creation and of computer-generated text, image, and other digitized media. This presentation reports on an application of Generative AI in the CGScholar platform, a community knowledge sharing and e-learning platform developed by researchers in the College of Education at the University of Illinois and Common Ground Research Networks. The presentation explores the intrinsic limits of Generative AI, bound as it is to language corpora and their textual representation through binary notation. Within these limits, we suggest the range of emerging and potential applications of Generative AI in education.

The dynamic nature of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine translation and generative AI is transforming language teaching into a field where traditional teaching methods intersect with rapidly evolving digital tools. These shifts bring to the forefront the need to identify how learners can make the most of these tools maintaining sound ethical and pedagogical practices. Based on data collected from a study of EFL learners in Japan, this presentation explores how learners engage with these technologies and how teachers can guide their learners to sound practices, The presentation explores the roles that the teacher needs to play in leading learners to use technologies in a self-regulated manner, and argues for the importance of emphasising the roles of instructor guidance and peer collaboration. An underlying need made clear is the need for open dialogue between teachers and learners and the need to provide clear guidelines to help support learners in using the tools.

Considering the history of the spread of English around the world, issues of linguistic imperialism and the cultural politics of language education have been discussed for a few decades now (Pennycook, 2017; Phillipson, 2009). Contemporary policies of promoting English by English-speaking countries beyond their borders have also been occasionally examined (Mirhosseini & Babu, 2020; Tupas & Tabiola, 2017). However, the actual implementation of these international policies seems to remain underexplored. Therefore, aiming to investigate one instance of the implementation of such policies of English language teaching, we explored the English Access Microscholarship Program (ACCESS) in the context of Morocco, where the program was designed “for students to gain an appreciation for American culture” (US Department of State’s Evaluation of the ACCESS Program, 2007, p. 2). This qualitative study was guided by two research questions: 1) What were the cultural elements imparted by the ACCESS program? and 2) What were the participants’ reactions to the program’s cultural contents in this context? To understand the experiences of Moroccan stakeholders involved with the program, we conducted interviews with three students, two teachers, and one administrator. Qualitative analysis of the interview data showed various aspects of the American culture embedded in these programs as well as a range of these participants’ perceptions and responses to the possible sociocultural influences of ACCESS. On this basis, we discuss cultural awareness that may be needed for audiences of such programs and for larger groups of English language policy makers, teachers, and learners worldwide.

In many L2 writing classrooms, teachers spend a massive amount of time responding to student writing. A large number of them adopt conventional feedback practices, marking student writing laboriously with much attention paid to errors, and dominating the feedback process without sharing responsibility with students. Despite the time and energy spent on written feedback, teachers themselves often feel that their efforts do not pay off as students continue to exhibit the same problems in writing. What’s worse, students lose motivation and confidence in writing and remain passive in the writing classroom. In this talk, I examine the “why”, “what” and “how” of feedback In L2 writing classrooms, and discuss how feedback can be used to motivate students and empower them to take greater responsibility for learning in writing. I also explore how technological and AI tools can be leveraged to maximize student engagement during the feedback process.

Registration Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfyBBVV5FefRbtJK8BB6lqk2261RSYQGdOz_gBJzj-aSKeeCw/viewform?usp=sf_link