Beyond AI (1): Looking back to move forward

We are starting with the Akan[1] word Sankofa, which means ‘to return, go, and get’ and symbolizes the taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present to make the future better through the benevolent use of knowledge (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). The concept of Sankofa has also been adopted in North America and elsewhere. In our context, understanding the past of language learning with technology, of language teaching methods and approaches, and of research and development in artificial intelligence (AI) helps language teachers to make sense of today’s generative AI (GenAI) technologies and their impact on the future of language education, if we shape teacher education now.

Looking back: Heift and Schulze (2007) reviewed the research and development at the intersection of AI[2] and Language Education during the years from 1978 to 2004 and identified 119 projects with published journal articles, book chapters, or reviewed conference proceedings. Other overviews in articles and book chapters (Bailin, 1995; Gamper & Knapp, 2002; Matthews, 1992, 1993; Nerbonne, 2003) relied on a smaller set of projects and publications. By comparison, the number of special issues of academic journals (e.g., Casañ-Núñez et al., 2025; Warschauer & Xu, 2024), books (e.g., Moorhouse & Wong, 2025; Ohashi et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2025), encyclopedia entries (e.g., Schulze, 2025a), policy papers (e.g., UNESCO, 2024; US Department of Education – Office of Educational Technology, 2023), guidelines (e.g., San Diego State University, 2025), as well as articles in media outlets (e.g., Clune, 2023, September 12) and posts on blogs (e.g., Mollick, 2026; Schulze, 2026), podcasts (e.g., ARD & Saarländischer Rundfunk, 2026; Bender & Hanna, 2026; Schulze & Hubbard, 2026) and social media (e.g., Meurers, 2026) since November 30, 2022 is significantly larger. GenAI tools have radically impacted the academic and professional discourses and the practical work in language education. In the last years, this powerful technology has been rapidly developed further and has received positive and negative hype (Bender & Hanna, 2025). 

In a keynote presentation for the JALTCALL conference (Schulze, 2025b),[3] I asked: Can the advances in GenAI help bridge gaps that exist in language education or will they result in new gaps opening up and existing connections – bridges – being severed? For example, will each learner have their own knowledgeable and patient artificial language tutor or will language learning become an orchid subject for the very few, because the majority of people use machine translation for their language needs. The search for answers to these and other questions has begun. Here I attempt to shed some light on the future of language education with AI and, thus, of language teacher education, by exploring where we have been already and where AI technologies came from, what we know already, what would be wise to keep and what would be safe to discard. Sankofa. I will look back more than fifty years in a narrative autoethnographic study. The title of this narrative is ‘The Imitation Game – or – Language, learning, and computers in the mist of time’ (section 3). ‘Imitation Game’, I borrowed from Alan Turing (1950), often called the father of AI, who lived from 1912 to 1954. His Imitation Game is known today as the Turing test. After sketching the way of the interpretation of and the reflection on the narrative in section 4, section 5 offers the main takeaways for teachers. And lastly, I will offer some closing thoughts on takeaways for teacher educators (section 6).

This is an excerpt from an early draft of a book chapter. The book will be about language teacher education and GenAI. I am positing 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.

References

ARD, & Saarländischer Rundfunk. (2026). KI – und jetzt? Wie wir Künstliche Intelligenz leben wollen. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://www.ardsounds.de/sendung/ki-und-jetzt-wie-wir-kuenstliche-intelligenz-leben-wollen/

Bailin, A. (1995). Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning: A Bibliography. Computers and the Humanities, 29(5), 375–387.

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.

Bender, E. M., & Hanna, A. (2026). Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mystery-ai-hype-theater-3000/id1690426042

Casañ-Núñez, J. C., Chenoll Mora, A., Millán Scheiding, C., & Saneleuterio Temporal, E. (Eds.). (2025). Eurocall Review 32. 2 (special issue): Generative artificial intelligence in foreign language learning and teacher education. Universitat Politècnica de València.

Clune, M. W. (2023, September 12). AI means professors need to raise their grading standards. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/ai-means-professors-need-to-raise-their-grading-standards

Gamper, J., & Knapp, J. (2002). A Review of Intelligent CALL Systems. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 15(4), 329–342.

Heift, T., & Schulze, M. (2007). Errors and Intelligence in CALL. Parsers and Pedagogues. Routledge.

Matthews, C. (1992). Intelligent CALL (ICALL) Bibliography. CTI Centre for Modern Languages.

Matthews, C. (1993). Grammar Frameworks in Intelligent CALL. CALICO JOURNAL, 11(1), 5–27.

Meurers, D. (2026). Detmar Meurers. LinkedIn posts. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://www.linkedin.com/in/detmar-meurers/

Mollick, E. (2026). Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/claude-dispatch-and-the-power-of

Moorhouse, B. L., & Wong, K. M. (2025). Generative artificial intelligence and language teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Nerbonne, J. (2003). Natural Language Processing in Computer-Assisted Language Learning. In R. Mitkov (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (pp. 670–698).

Ohashi, L., Hillis, M., & Dykes, R. (Eds.). (2025). Artificial intelligence in our language learning classrooms. Candlin & Mynard ePublishing.

San Diego State University. (2025). Generative AI (GenAI). Guidelines for SDSU. https://brand.sdsu.edu/_files/sdsu-gen-ai-guidelines-oct-2025.pdf

Schulze, M. (2025a). The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on CALL pedagogies. In L. McCallum & D. Tafazoli (Eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Schulze, M. (2025b). Language learning with GenAI: Bridging the gap or burning the bridge (keynote presentation) JALTCALL 2025, Tokyo, Japan. https://pantarhei.press/2026/05/12/language-learning-with-genai-bridging-the-gap-or-burning-the-bridge/

Schulze, M. (2026). Computer-assisted language learning and AI. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://pantarhei.press/2026/04/27/computer-assisted-language-learning-and-ai/

Schulze, M., & Hubbard, P. (2026). Opening AI for Language Learning. Podcast. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://rss.com/podcasts/oaill/

Turing, A. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, LIX(236), 433–460.

UNESCO. (2024). AI competency framework for teachers U. Publishing. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000391104

US Department of Education – Office of Educational Technology. (2023). Artificial intelligence and the future of teaching and learning.  Retrieved from https://tech.ed.gov/ai-future-of-teaching-and-learning/

Wang, Y., Alm, A., & Dizon, G. (Eds.). (2025). Insights into AI and language teaching and learning. Castledown Publishers.

Warschauer, M., & Xu, Y. (Eds.). (2024). Artificial intelligence for language learning. Entering a new era. Special issue of Language Learning & Technology 28.2. National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Sankofa. Retrieved 2026-05-25 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankofa

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[1] Akan is the most widely spoken language in Ghana.

[2] AI was then a mix of symbolic natural language processing, expert systems, and student models.

[3] I am grateful for having had the opportunity to present an earlier version of this autoethnographic study conference of the special interest group in CALL in the Japan Association for Language Teaching.