Research to Policy

WEBINAR RECORDING

TITLE: AI for Empowering Educators: Transforming Support for Newcomers and English Learners
DATE: Jan 29, 2025
TIME: 4:00–4:30 p.m. EDT

DETAILS:
Discover how Artificial Intelligence can revolutionize teaching practices for educators working with Newcomers and English Learners. This session explored practical AI tools and strategies to personalize learning, enhance language development, and streamline teacher workflows, empowering educators to better meet the unique needs of multilingual students.

RESOURCES

https://tovar.us

WEBINAR RECORDING

TITLE: What Matters: Culturally and Ecologically Responsive Designs
DATE: Dec 10, 2024
TIME: 4:00–4:30 p.m. EDT

DETAILS:
The rise of AI technology provides unprecedented opportunities to support diverse learners’ language and literacy development. Developing and implementing pedagogical innovation integrating technology to support multilingual learners is not optional, but required, otherwise, many of these learners will fall behind at an accelerating rate, with classroom instruction disconnected from the reality of most learners. During this webinar, panelists will discuss how to integrate technology effectively in advancing diverse learners’ academic vocabulary knowledge, reading and writing skills. They will show lessons learned from their own intervention studies starting from early usage of online dictionaries to support hypertext reading comprehension, moving onto Web 2.0 technologies, such as social media, smart phone technologies to support vocabulary acquisition and academic writing.  This leads now onto generative AI-assisted discourse analysis to support corpus-based data driven learning. Critical alignments are required for instructional designs between complex cultural and ecological factors and technology affordance, which significantly impacts the implementation fidelity of language pedagogical innovations—teaching practices—, learner experiences and outcomes.

RESOURCES

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TITLE: Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition: The Case of African American Language
DATE: Nov 12, 2024
TIME: 4:00–4:30 p.m. EDT

DETAILS:
Many modern technologies, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, have been shown to have significant racial biases, which can impact many areas of people’s lives. We seek to integrate research on African American Languages into analysis on how ASRs could prove harmful to many speakers. In this webinar, we pose a number of questions for reflection and future work, and offer resources for cross-disciplinary collaboration towards more equitable engagement with technological systems.

RESOURCES

To view the article written by our panelists Kelly Wright and Joshua Martin click HERE.

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TITLE: Reverse-Designing Responses to Emerging Technologies in Multilingual Contexts
DATE: Oct 08, 2024
TIME: 4:00–4:30 p.m. EDT

DETAILS:
Integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education presents challenges and opportunities. A reverse design approach can help stakeholders implement these technologies strategically and purposefully. This webinar discusses the Chicago approach to reverse design, its impact on language education, and how this approach can be implemented when shaping responses to generative AI in language education.

RESOURCES

Resources are available at the following link: CAL Webinar | University of Chicago Language Center (uchicago.edu)

Q&A Responses

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TITLE: Responsible AI in Assessment
DATE: Sep 10, 2024
TIME: 4:00–4:30 p.m. EDT

DETAILS:
AI offers significant opportunities for assessments by enabling secure, remote tests that expand access. However, it also poses risks, including the potential for new cheating behaviors, such as using generative AI tools like ChatGPT for writing assistance. As these AI capabilities continue to disrupt traditional assessment methods, integrating Responsible AI (RAI) practices into assessment development and policy becomes crucial. RAI is a global concern, and governments around the world have developed guidelines aimed at mitigating potential harms associated with AI. These guidelines are grounded in ethical principles and aim to identify risks and develop practices that uphold the quality of tests. The webinar highlights the need to develop further and expand RAI principles for assessment practices.

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TITLE: Improving Language Accessibility VIA Technologically Mediated Lexical Simplification
DATE: Aug 13, 2024
TIME: 4:00–4:30 p.m. EDT

DETAILS:
During this webinar, panelists will discuss how Mediated Lexical Simplification can help to improve Language Accessibility. Lexical Simplification (LS) is the task of automatically improving the accessibility and readability of any given text by replacing hard-to-read words with simpler alternatives. LS systems achieve this by leveraging recent advances in AI, including large language models (LLMs), such as GPT 3.5 and others, to suggest several simplified alternatives to an identified complex word that maintains the original text’s meaning. Various LS systems have been designed to improve text accessibility for differing target demographics, including second-language English learners, individuals with a reading disability, or adults with low literacy. However, more collaboration is needed between AI researchers and real-world classroom environments to determine the effectiveness of LS systems.

WEBINAR ANNOUNCEMENT

TITLE: Has Artificial Intelligence Rendered Language Learning and Teaching Obsolete?
DATE: July 09, 2024
TIME: 4:00–4:30 p.m. EDT

DETAILS:

From the beginning of the first wave of AI, dating back to speech technologies in the early 2000s, there has always been a keen interest in how technologies might be harnessed to facilitate language learning and teaching. Now, almost a quarter century later, there are a number of possible directions language learning and teaching might take as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent technological advances.

AI technologies were originally aimed at developing machines that can use language and “think” abstractly. In this webinar, we look at the potential existential threat AI poses to language teaching and the need to learn a language in the first place. This existential threat sits alongside a decline in language learning opportunities across the English-speaking world.

It is critical that language educators have a more in-depth understanding of what AI is and how it works, in order to fully appreciate the extent to which AI can (or cannot!) replace language teachers and the need to learn a foreign language. We’ll explore what AI is, the range of AI technologies that might be deployed in language teaching, and how those technologies work – and whether AI might really ever replace language teachers.