Language is central to most of the key issues faced by societies in the 21st century, whether it’s the world of social media, echo chambers and misinformation, or generative AI-driven chatbots such as ChatGPT, or authoritarian and populist politicians promoting post-truth discourse. Understanding of language(s) and awareness of how language functions are more important than ever in being able to actively work with technological and societal change.
In the field of language(s) teaching and education, artificial intelligence has led to astounding advances in the ability of technology to translate between languages and to capture speech into text. The language teachers of the future will need to be able to harness the power of AI to personalise language learning and teaching: for example, ongoing analysis of learners’ speech and writing can potentially be turned into individualised learning tasks.
Research in the field of language education will need to become increasingly interdisciplinary, with language educators studying alongside linguists, sociologists, philosophers and machine learning experts to revolutionise the way language is taught and learned.
Beyond the language classroom, applied linguistics need to work with AI experts in developing understandings of how misinformation is disseminated and what can be done to counter post-truth discourses.
The developing ability of AI to process huge amounts of language data can have an impact in areas such as medical care and criminology, among many others. For example, thousands of doctor-patient interactions can be analysed to investigate patterns between stated symptoms and medical diagnoses to identify potential ways in which doctors may miss key patient information due to the way patients choose to communicate symptoms. In the area of cybercrime, the anonymity of online trolls is a huge challenge for police. However, forensic authorship analysis is a way forward in identifying suspects which can be strengthened through collaborations between police and computational linguists.
The Institute of Language Education at Moray House School of Education and Sport can play an important role in conducting research alongside colleagues in other Schools (e.g., PPLS, Informatics, Social and Political Science, Centre for Open Learning) to take forward research addressing key language-related issues and challenges in our rapidly changing social, political and technological landscape.
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Language and Intercultural Communication
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
About the author
Dr Kenneth Fordyce is co-head of the Institute for Language Education (ILE).
