I began to learn about AI, computational linguistics, NLP, student modeling, and machine translation in 1995, when I went across the street from the Manchester Metropolitan University to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and its Centre for Computational Linguistics. I taught full time – German, linguistics, and CALL – and began working towards my PhD in Language Engineering (Applied Linguistics). Alan Ramsay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_M._Ramsay), my doctoral supervisor, taught me the basics of NLP and let me use the parser he had developed and that was being expanded for a variety of languages at the time. My work on a grammar checker for students of German – my PhD topic – was also my foray into ICALL, the application of AI, especially NLP, to CALL.
This is an excerpt from an early draft of a book chapter. The book will be about language teacher education and GenAI. I am posting these in smaller (mostly) self-contained posts. The posts are numbered consecutively. After they will have all come out, I will link them with each other.
The field of ICALL was very small in the 1990s. In 1998, my UMIST colleague Marie-Josée Hamel (https://www.uottawa.ca/about-us/official-languages-bilingualism-institute/professors/marie-josee-hamel) and I organized a one-day conference on NLP and CALL. Its proceedings were published as the first ever special issue of ReCALL (Schulze & Hamel, 2021; Schulze et al., 1999). A year after that, interested colleagues encouraged me to form Eurocall’s special interest group (SIG) in Natural Language Processing. Later it was called ICALL and collaborated with the SIG of the same name in CALICO. In the early 2000s, Trude Heift (https://www.sfu.ca/~heift/index.html) and I chaired both SIGs and organized a number of pre-conference workshops on ICALL at CALICO (https://calico.org/conference) and Eurocall (https://eurocall-languages.org/events/past-conferences/) as well as smaller conferences in the US and Canada to bring the few CALL researchers interested in AI and NLP together. Special issues and other publications were the result (e.g., Schulze, 2008b).
The literature on ICALL was scattered across different fields – CALL, computers and education, computational linguistics, NLP, AI and education, … Many of them went unnoticed by CALL researchers and practitioners at the time. Udo Jung (2002), for example, in one of his CALL bibliographies, lists 11 publications under ‘artificial intelligence’, 7 — under ‘parser’, and only 2 — under ‘ICALL’, among the 558 he actually found; he overlooked many. A monograph on ICALL was needed in the early 2000s.
One evening at the WorldCALL conference in Banff, Canada, in 2003, Trude and I sat across the table from an acquisition editor of Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers that produced the journal Computer Assisted Language Learning (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ncal20) and had started a book series on CALL under the editorship of Carol Chapelle (https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/carolc/) and Graham Davies (https://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/cvgd.htm).
Swets & Zeitlinger was bought by Taylor & Francis and became a Routledge imprint, while we were working on the book manuscript.
By the end of the evening, Trude and I were planning to combine our completed PhD theses – both on ICALL and German – and to use them as a basis for our work on the first monograph giving an overview of ICALL (Heift & Schulze, 2007), introducing the underlying concepts of parsing of learner text for errors, feedback algorithm, and student model. These are the components of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) (Sleeman & Brown, 1982) that can provide adaptive corrective metalinguistic feedback and that were based on hand-written computational grammar rules and pedagogic algorithms and not on machine learning and statistics. Trude’s e-Tutor (Heift, 2010) was one of very few examples of an ITS – also a branch of AI – that was used by students at a few universities.
Over the years, I wrote several pieces on ICALL, but then there came a time when I was busy with other projects – being in a Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada – and had less time to dedicate to writing a computational grammar or programming other aspects of an ITS. I published my last article on ICALL (Schulze, 2008a), which gets cited a lot today to reference work done on AI and language learning before 2023, and the last handbook chapter on ICALL (Tschichold & Schulze, 2016) with Cornelia Tschichold (https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/c.tschichold/). Before 2023, I worked on topics such as Tutorial CALL (Heift & Schulze, 2015; Schulze, 2024) and adaptive instruction (Schulze et al., 2025) that touched on ICALL, but did not pay attention to developments in statistical language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for about ten years before GenAI suddenly became mainstream. It was serendipitous at best that I looked back on the history of AI and language education in 2022, using the lenses of adaptive instruction and disruptive technology (Schulze, 2022a, 2022b), without thinking about GenAI or LLMs. Instead of focusing on AI in my research, I worked on the first online language courses at the University of Waterloo starting in 2001 (Liebscher & Schulze, 2002, 2005; Schulze & Liebscher, 2010; Schulze et al., 2007; Schulze & Scholz, 2018) and investigated complex adaptive systems in CALL (Scholz & Schulze, 2017; Schulze & Scholz, 2016; Schulze & Wood, 2008).
Machine learning and artificial neural network
It was in early 2023 (Schulze, 2023a, 2023b) that I dusted off my old records and started writing and blogging about GenAI. I felt a voice of – historical – reason was needed. Yet, I am still a little overwhelmed by the speed and breadth of the development of GenAI and the Boomer vs. Doomer rhetoric, but I insist – also in this chapter – that knowing what happened before the explosion of GenAI is important also for language teachers. And perhaps, it is even more important not to forget language learning in all this AI hype (Bender & Hanna, 2025).
Intermittently, I have included a reflective sentence like the last one. Now it is time to end the narrative. Of course, there are more stories about me as a language learner, language teacher, and ICALL researcher. However, this should suffice as data for a reflection and interpretation, in order to illuminate the ongoing developments of GenAI in language education.
References
Bender, E. M., & Hanna, A. (2025). The AI con: How to fight big tech’s hype and create the future we want. Harper Collins Publishers.
Heift, T. (2010). Developing an Intelligent Tutor. CALICO JOURNAL, 27(3), 443–459.
Heift, T., & Schulze, M. (2007). Errors and Intelligence in CALL. Parsers and Pedagogues. Routledge.
Heift, T., & Schulze, M. (2015). Tutorial CALL. Language Teaching, 48(4), 471–490.
Jung, U. O. H. (2002). An International Bibliography of Computer Assisted Language Learning: Fifth Installment. System, 30, 349–398.
Liebscher, G., & Schulze, M. (2002). German Online – A Course for Beginners. Forum Deutsch, 1/2002, 8–12.
Liebscher, G., & Schulze, M. (2005). Task-Based Learning and Community of Practice in an Elementary German Course. In German as a Foreign Language.
Scholz, K., & Schulze, M. (2017). Digital-gaming trajectories and second-language development. Language Learning & Technology, 21(1), 100–120.
Schulze, M. (2008a). AI in CALL – Artificially Inflated or Almost Imminent? CALICO JOURNAL, 25(3), 510–527.
Schulze, M. (Ed.). (2008b). Interfaces in Intelligent CALL. Special Issue of Computer Assisted Language Learning (21.4). Routledge.
Schulze, M. (2022a). The Imitation Game. Smart language learning and artificial intelligence. Keynote. International CALL Conference 2022, Tokyo, Japan (online).
Schulze, M. (2022b). What is Intelligent CALL doing in the twenties? Plenary presentation. Eurocall 2022, Reykjavik, Iceland (online).
Schulze, M. (2023a). What’s AI got to do with it? Retrieved 2026-05-26 from https://pantarhei.press/2023/10/04/whats-ai/
Schulze, M. (2023b). What’s AI got to do with it? Pedagogic perspectives Eurocall 2023, Reykjavik, Iceland.
Schulze, M. (2024). Tutorial CALL — Language practice with the computer. In R. Hampel & U. Stickler (Eds.), Bloomsbury Handbook of Language Learning and Technologies (pp. 35–47). Bloomsbury Publishing.
Schulze, M., Caws, C., Hamel, M.-J., & Heift, T. (2025). Adaptive instruction. In G. Stockwell (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of Technology in Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 195–212). Cambridge University Press.
Schulze, M., & Hamel, M.-J. (Eds.). (2021). Natural language processing in computer-assisted language learning. ReCALL 11.S1. (reprint of a special issue). Cambridge University Press.
Schulze, M., Hamel, M.-J., & Thompson, J. (Eds.). (1999). Language Processing in CALL. ReCALL Special Publication (Proceedings of a One-Day Conference “Natural Language Processing in Computer-Assisted Language Learning” Held at UMIST, 9 May 1998, Organised by the Centre of Computational Linguistics, UMIST, in Association with Eurocall). CTICML.
Schulze, M., & Liebscher, G. (2010). Going in cycles: Courseware and material development for written communication. CALICO JOURNAL, 27(3).
Schulze, M., Liebscher, G., & Su, M. Z. (2007). Geroline. Student Perception and Attainment in an Online German Language Course. German as a Foreign Language, 2007(1), 1–25.
Schulze, M., & Scholz, K. (2016). CALL theory: Complex adaptive systems. In C. Caws & M.-J. Hamel (Eds.), Learner-computer interactions: New insights on CALL theories and applications (pp. 65–88). John Benjamins Pub.
Schulze, M., & Scholz, K. (2018). Learning trajectories and the role of online courses in a language program. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 31(3), 185–205.
Schulze, M., & Wood, P. (2008). Computational analysis of task-based performance Conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC.
Sleeman, D., & Brown, J. S. (Eds.). (1982). Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Academic Press.
Tschichold, C., & Schulze, M. (2016). Intelligent CALL and written language. In L. Murray & F. Farr (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language learning and technology. Routledge.
