How AI could change learning: six takeaways from Ireland’s largest ever event for language teachers

It was billed as the largest ever event for language teachers in Ireland. But, if you weren’t one of the 1,200 attendees at the Languages Connect Summit at Dublin’s National Convention Centre earlier this month, what did you miss?

Karen Ruddock, director of Post-Primary Languages Ireland and Languages Connect, which was developed in 2018 to lead Ireland’s strategy for foreign Languages in education, said the gathering was about giving an opportunity for teachers and others to collaborate and learn new skills across dozens of workshops.

“The idea was to gather a range of stakeholders, in particular current and future teachers, to celebrate their profession and all that has been achieved for modern languages by the strategy so far as well as to share expertise ... among educators,” Ruddock added..

From more than 50 workshops from expert speakers, 63 exhibition stands comprising embassies, teacher associations and publishers, with a representation of 17 languages, (some teachers representing newly introduced Leaving Cert languages such as Lithuanian, Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese), here are some key takeaways from the event:

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1. A ‘plurilingualistic’ society is a happy one

Multilingualism is still important and isn’t a million miles away from plurilingualism, a concept that emerged largely by virtue of the European Union wishing to eradicate an increasingly reductive “English as a lingua franca” mindset in the late 90s to early 2000s.

While multilingualism is the existence of and capacity to speak many languages, plurilingualism (and subsequently pluriculturalism) goes a step further to holistically acknowledge the interconnectedness of these languages with different identities and strives to utilise them adaptively in different communicative contexts.

This acknowledgment is crucial for a cohesive, integrated and democratic society within the context of increased refugees, globalisation and other factors, according to keynote speaker Professor Terry Lamb. He also emphasised the importance of recognising and trying to incorporate a child’s native or home language into the classroom, in order for their unique identity and voice to be heard and most importantly, to feel loved.

Also in attendance was Dalton Tatton, assistant secretary general in the Department of Education, who spoke of the many enriching benefits of studying languages. Beyond clear employment opportunities, social skills such as empathy, adaptability and critical intercultural thinking were highlighted. He added that teachers play a crucial role in promoting the uptake of languages as well as the creation of its consequential global citizenship among students.

2. To be or not to be multilingual – that is the economic question

Language skills aren’t just paramount for the labour market – they are vital in boosting our voice in Europe.

“Everyone has the right to acquire skills that allow full participation in society and the labour market,” said Karen Ruddock. “It is no longer enough to think about this in the context of Ireland – we live in Europe, but without several languages, we have no voice in Europe and no access to the mobility that the union offers ... In the global context where English is no longer a competitive advantage, because everyone speaks it, we need other languages to compete”.

Ireland has been taking steps to address this with different incentivising strategies and initiatives in recent years, such as PPLI’s “say yes to languages” primary school sampler module. It preludes the introduction of modern languages to the primary school curriculum in Irish schools from 2025.

We’ve still got a way to go: Eurostat’s 2016 report placed Ireland in a rather low scoring multilingual category, stating that only about 50 per cent of the population spoke a second language. By contrast, Nordic countries and the Netherlands scored as high as 80-90 per cent.

Time will tell if Ireland manages to step up to the plurilingualism challenge.

3. Take a ‘Clil pill’: How to boost immersive language learning

Content and Language Integrated Learning, or Clil, was described as “an unstoppable train” and “the most important innovation in language learning in the last 20 years”, said Dr María Luisa Pérez Cañado.

In a nutshell, Clil means students learn another subject like geography or history immersively through a foreign language.

Despite singing in its praises, Cañado didn’t shy away from the challenges and issues resulting in its lack of implementation across schools, particularly in Ireland.

Teacher training, confidence as well as catering to diversity in mainstream education were among some of these issues of which Cañado deemed treatable by “Clil pills”, such as training reform and diversity frameworks.

Cañado also spoke about the need to ditch “accent snobbery” of non-native speakers, as well as the need to adapt language teaching to include real, authentic language rather than obsolete textbook vocabulary and phrases.

4. Is AI about to reinvent language teaching and learning?

Joe Dale, linguist, researcher, independent languages consultant and Youtuber, discussed the place of artificial intelligence (AI) and other innovative technologies in language pedagogy.

He didn’t shy away from some of the shortcomings of AI yet invited educators to adopt an open-minded approach to the possible benefits of its use in the classroom. These include a reduced administrative workload for teachers with tools like ChatGPT as well as the provision of tailored feedback on lessons.

Dale also examined innovative ways that technological tools like immersive reader or live captioning can promote inclusion and accessibility in the classroom. In a demonstration to attendees, he used a simple inbuilt feature in PowerPoint to translate speech instantaneously into a number of languages, including Ukrainian to cater for students whose mother tongue may not be English, for example.

Dale also discussed the positive developments that popular language learning apps such as Duolingo, Babbel and Kahoot – which incorporate AI in some form in their technology – had brought about over the past decade.

For Dale, predicting the next 10 years of language learning would be “foolhardy”, given the rate at which educational technology and methods are advancing. But he said it was important to consider the potential value of AI and other cutting edge technologies, not with a view of entirely transforming nor replacing teaching methods, but rather to harness and ameliorate those already in existence.

5. Funding for student exchange programmes is on the rise

The EU’s budget for staff and student mobility exchanges is getting bigger.

Léargas, the national agency for managing national and international programmes in youth work, education and training such as Erasmus+ and eTwinning, to name a few, provided workshops to promote the numerous opportunities and advantages of pursuing such funded programmes.

Una Carthy and Geraldine Zechner, teachers and participants of the Erasmus+ programme and eTwinning (a free online platform and community for different European schools to interact and collaborate together), spoke of the transformative language learning benefits that can be achieved by setting up staff or student mobility exchanges to another EU member state.

Zechner, a teacher at a Deis school, stated that its Erasmus+ student mobility project provided an “excellent, unique and accessible means to all of our students to participate in two trips to France, and to benefit from the amazing opportunities that come with engaging in such a culturally diverse and authentic experience, which they may not have been able to avail of had the funded project not been implemented”.

Deirdre O’Brien, senior support and development officer for Erasmus+ in the school sector, said hundreds of schools have benefited from the programme so far and they expect a steady increase in participants in the coming years.

The budget for the current Erasmus funding cycle (2021-2027) is expected to amount to €26bn, almost double that allocated to the previous programme (2014-2020).

This funding is part of the EU’s larger aim to create a common European Education Area or EEA in which collaboration and priorities such as inclusion and diversity, digital transformation, environmental sustainability and the active participation in democratic life are spearheaded.

6. Language teaching isn’t just about textbooks – it’s a space for dancing, singing and other fun activities

In the world of second language acquisition research, the latest and most applied methods have been known to come and go out of pedagogical fashion. From the grammar translation method to the audio-lingual method to a now widely used in Ireland task-based learning approach, there nonetheless remains room for innovation and creative input into new language teaching methods.

Notably, those of Dragan Miladinovic who led a workshop on “using performance to learn languages”, discussing pragmatic ways to incorporate drama pedagogy as a gateway to language learning. Other unconventional approaches presented included “improving memory through music and imagery recall” (Paco Fernandez), “tactile learning with movements” (Dagmara Furman) and “Podcasting in language assessment” (Gabriella Caponi and Sara Lis Ventura).