Reflections on EAQUALS Online 11-12 October 2024
By Levent Çoban
01.11.2024
Thanks to Sabancı University School of Languages, I had the opportunity to attend EAQUALS Online 2024. It was a fruitful 2-day event which revolved around AI and other trends in language education. Below are my takeaways and some key ideas from some of the sessions I attended:
Beyond the Hype: Building Institutional Frameworks for Effective AI Use in ELT by Dr. Hakan Tarhan
As AI is ubiquitous now, it’s crucial to develop a contextual framework around its use, rather than fearing or banning it. This process involves:
1. Forming Teams: Create teams of interested teachers to develop and continuously refine the AI framework.
2. Understand What is Happening and What is Needed: Evaluate the current understanding and use of AI among students, teachers, and parents, and review existing policies at local, regional, or institutional levels. This allows institutions to understand both the present situation and the needs for guiding and teaching ethical and responsible use of AI.
3. Framework Design and Development: Create a framework that aligns AI use with personal and institutional goals, emphasizing a human-centered approach.
4. Ongoing Support Mechanisms: Build an infrastructure for easy access to AI resources, experience-sharing, and evaluations. This continuous support contributes to AI literacy, where teachers, students, parents and other stakeholders understand how to use AI to foster creativity responsibly and ethically.
Adopting a Pedagogy-first Approach to AI Integration in Language Learning by Hakan Tarhan
While teachers are skilled with the pedagogical knowledge in education, AI lacks this understanding. Teachers’ expertise and experience in teaching can enhance integration of AI into language education. The following activities integrate AI into the classroom effectively by keeping human agency, creativity, and critical thinking abilities in practice:
1. Co-Constructing an Outline: In this activity, students first prepare their own outline independently. Then, they ask ChatGPT to create an outline on the same topic. Next, they compare both versions to develop a final outline. This process highlights the importance of human creativity since students brainstorm on their own first, before seeking AI support. Here, the typical “Think-Pair-Share” structure becomes “Think-Pair-GENAI-Share,” integrating AI while preserving the value of individual brainstorming to employ creative skills first.
2. Critical Thinking Exercises: Design open-ended problems that require research, analysis, or creativity. Students can chat with an AI-generated character related to the lesson (a character from a reading text, for example), discussing challenging topics and reflecting on the conversation. Here, the character themselves can be a challenging one as well, and the students reflect on what makes them challenging; tone of the character, their vocabulary choice, etc.
3. Problem-Solution Tasks: Students are given real-life problems, they use AI to brainstorm solutions, and then discuss as a group to finalize a solution that would work the best. In this way, they also develop their critical thinking and evaluation skills.
4. Fact-Checking Exercises: Give students AI-generated statements and have them verify these through corroborating sources. This exercise is also a good one to teach them the importance of verifying information received from AI, media, or other online tools.
The discussions on AI extended beyond these sessions at this year’s online event. In one of the concurrent sessions titled “Responsible Use of Generative AI in Language Education,” Christopher Sanders emphasized the importance of prompt engineering on ChatGPT to achieve accurate and desired results, as well as showing how to use AI for language teaching purposes. In another session, “Leveraging AI for Language Learning and Teaching” Nazan Gelbal shared their own approach to using AI in the classroom, illustrating with examples from their language classes. Overall, this year’s EAQUALS Online event significantly contributed to the discussions around AI use in language education.
The online event was not limited to AI, though. Other trends and good practices in language education also covered a significant part of the event.
Going From Ticking a Box to Having an Impact by Gillian Davidson and David Byrne
In one of the concurrent sessions, Gillian Davidson and David Byrne revisited what both students and teachers must do inside and outside the classroom to make a meaningful impact, rather than just ticking boxes. Teachers are generally aware of how they work and what to do to develop classroom engagement and professional growth; however, when considering students' learning journeys and an institution's teaching philosophy as well as individual teachers’ professional development, do we know how much impact we leave?
To Create a Positive Impact in the Classroom:
1. Adapt the Lesson Structure: Enhance the traditional “Set the Stage -> Input -> Close the Loop” lesson plan by including a discussion on the lesson objectives during the "Set the Stage" phase. This goes beyond showing the objectives to the students; discussing them opens ways for students to assess their progress by the end of the lesson.
2. Engage Students in the Process: One effective way to encourage students to be mindful of their impact is through close monitoring. Despite our efforts as teachers, much of what is worth praising or correcting often goes unnoticed when we monitor the whole class as we can't hear everything. Therefore, to make a lasting impact, it’s essential to layer monitoring within a lesson. The presenters emphasized the importance of assigning part of this responsibility to students. We can, for instance, assign students the role of active listeners in a speaking exercise. By being mindful of the lesson’s objectives, students can observe and evaluate their peers' performances. This approach also gives teachers more freedom to monitor the rest of the task more effectively, as a result, leaving a meaningful impact rather than just ticking a box. Though challenging at first, this practice becomes habitual as students understand their role in the process.
3. Set Success Criteria: Establish clear success criteria and discuss these with students. Encourage students to reflect on their own progress using the criteria. This also support them to become autonomous learners.
4. Teacher Development: To have an impact beyond the classroom, the presenters also discussed CPD observations, highlighting how varied observation tools can foster impactful development. This got me thinking the importance of peer observations. Just like we encourage our students for peer feedback, creating more systematic peer observation tools, cycles, and criteria to improve observation processes will benefit the teachers to a great deal.
The discussions around trends and practices in teaching beyond AI were not limited to just one session at this year’s online event. For example, in a session titled “Bust Language Learning Myths for Self-Directed Success,” Vladlena Tcherkachina introduced their own version of the “GRIND RICE” acronym to demonstrate the key principles for effective language learning. "GRIND RICE" stands for Goal Setting, Research, Immersion, Nudging, Deconstruction, Revision, Interval Recycling, Communication 2.0, and Evaluation of Success, which will eventually foster more learner autonomy according to Tcherkachina.
In “Using Multilinguistic Approaches to Support Language Teaching and Learning,” Kim Beadle discussed practical methods to foster diversity in language classes. One interesting discussion during the session was the use of students’ L1 in language teaching classes, as Beadle suggested that a certain degree of use of L1 in lesson activities encourages students to be more attentive since, for example, students naturally think in their own language before doing so in English. While many language teachers may feel skeptical about this idea, it presents an interesting point for research, exploration, and discussion, with consideration of both its advantages and disadvantages.