Interview on GenAI and language learning
In July 2025, I was fortunate to be invited to the JALTCALL conference in Tokyo. JALT is the Japan Association for Language Teaching and JALTCALL is its (very large) special interest group in computer-assisted language learning. Michael Hofmeyr, the local organizer and brilliant host of JALTCALL 2025…
Assessment and GenAI
Often assessment focuses on the product and not the process; the submitted essay gets graded and not the process of writing it. Students can generate these material results of an assessed activity – a short essay, presentation, poster, or audio or video recording – more quickly and with a…
Timothy Snyder on the Holocaust as History and Warning
When I served as the director of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, I started the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Lecture, the annual flagship event of the Center. For the last lecture that I organized – with a lot of help from many colleagues – we were…
Learner motivation and GenAI
Language teachers know that learners need to obtain and then to maintain a level of motivation in their second-language learning and language use. Motivation has become more important in the context of GenAI, as the example of recent advances in machine translation show. Commonly available machine translation…
Opening AI for Language Learning (OAILL)
… is a series of recorded conversations on topics at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular Generative AI (GenAI), and Language Education. We have started using the acronym OAILL, pronounced /owaıl/. With my accent this sounds like the German weil (=because), but it should be…
Second-language use in dialog … with a GenAI-based chatbot
Teachers and students alike have used or can use GenAI-based chatbots in their first language. They produce texts that at least sound plausible in the commonly taught languages and in some of the less commonly taught languages, if large language models are available. For these languages, GenAI…
Conversation and AI: Language in the wild?
From late 2022 to early 2025, several LLM-based chatbots were released, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek. All of them can generate conversational responses with remarkable linguistic accuracy and contextual appropriateness and at almost turn-taking speed. Such chatbots can be prompted to adjust the…
Von Berlin to Kitchener – changing the name of a Canadian city
Before 1916, the city of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, was called Berlin. Ten years ago in 2016, colleagues from the Waterloo Centre for German Studies and I organized a panel discussion that marked the 100th anniversary of that name change. This discussion took place and was recorded in…
Professional development and GenAI
The degree to which generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has rapidly infiltrated education is unparalleled. Language education has been particularly impacted because GenAI tools process and generate the learning objective of that education, i.e., human language. Language teacher education programs have been faced with addressing GenAI since the…
Ten skill and knowledge areas for (language) teaching with GenAI
We propose 10 areas for language teachers to develop fundamental knowledge and skills in. While these do not constitute an exhaustive list, they cover a wide range of the main applications of GenAI for language education. We suggest that teachers devote a few hours to exploring each…
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