Back to school – back to technology… struggles

/ Lesson tips, New to ELT

This week was about welcoming students back to our online or face-to-face courses. More than half of them are pre-teens or teens, so it’s always a moment to understand how fast kids grow, how fast they change. Another ‘Aw’ moment is to realise that although students might not be involved in active English studying, their brains seem to connect concepts unconsciously. This applies also to adult students: a short break benefits their fluency and accuracy in speaking, as if the brain had played puzzle with the bits and pieces we had elaborated together – even in the absence of the teacher. A breathtaking (f)act of the human mind.

This year was also marked by another breathtaking fact: gadgets talk to young people more than any written text. Before, I used to give my students a short list of possible activities to do over the summer in English, in order to practise. I mean, a list of really nice, engaging activities. Needless to say, these lists were never printed, opened, found or used in any way – apart from being moved into my Archive file recently. So this year, I went digital and sent a short video with a question, a 5-minute reading/listening task, a song to listen to and do a quick task, etc. to my students once every week. It took me an hour weekly and it also gave value to my time spent on social media watching funny videos. Differentiation was key here: except for some united groups, most students got something that was linked to their repeated mistakes (errors). It worked.

It also gave information about students’ preferences: surprisingly, nobody reacted to the written task, but everybody watched the funny video about lexical items linked to shoes. So, I also had materials for my first lesson: what did/didn’t we learn in the summer?

Legitimate is the question, whether it also means that I’m bound to teach with funny videos and leave all written texts? My generation was raised with the idea that intelligent people read and visual inputs (television at that time) could not give you factual information. However, I never agreed. I think, Hollywoodian films change historical facts and this is wrong, but the movie industry is evolving too, and more and more materials are available with reliable content. (Btw, remember the famous saying: History is written by victors, so what is factual about history? – HERE you can find a really interesting example of one source-less historical belief in Italian by GeoPop). In addition, documentaries are getting attention due to their visual and entertaining values, so we have plenty of multimedia materials to use in any lessons.

This does not take away the value of a good read or the importance of writing, yet, I would re-evaluate the type of texts we ask our students to write and to read. Apart from Academic English where classic novels are a must, in General and Business English courses it is imperative to consider the real needs of students. Nobody really needs to be able to write an article – if not a journalist – but we post on social media. Nobody really needs to write a short story, but we need to leave comments on service websites and should justify our ranking. Digital citizenship means to know how to communicate in written form, this can vary from a simple post series  over a work email or a well-written profile to a comment about a YouTube video. Why not teach how to write in the digital world? Because we do write – a lot.

Read between the lines: this means that you need to doubt a language course which is ‘only conversation’. Do you really need only spoken language?

Our necessity of teaching writing is also threatened by the very up-to-date reality of the up-coming (?) AI. I can’t be the only teacher who has already received tons of perfect essays written by ChatGPT and comments like ‘Siri, come si dice ‘Non ho fatto i compiti’ in inglese?’ or Alexa in the background giving the correct answer to a question asked in an online lesson. As with any new technology, people expect an apocalypse. The puzzling thing about this technology is, though, that even their developers can’t answer the question how AI might affect our lives in the very near future. They know that the variety is 1 to the infinite. So let me think just about the most obvious changes, teachers will make in the future:

• Essays written by AI: it would be useful to know whether there is a database for all the contents AI creates (or should I use the plural form here?). This register could be precious to double-check if a written work is original. For teachers, the message is: test your students in class. This will definitely reduce the quantity of written homework assignments (which is not bad), and transform them into creative alternatives or demolish them forever. This will also give a renaissance to face-to-face teaching and testing. The same is happening in social media and even more on dating websites: since these have been overflown by fake accounts and bots, people once again will be pushed back to real life for real experience.
• Students prefer automated online courses, where they can decide about their own pace. This is enhanced by AI-driven technologies such as personalised materials and reminders, immediate correction, etc. As I’ve recently found out, we can also do conversation lessons with an AI. This technology will serve a huge group of people and many of them might even succeed. What I really find important, though, is the attention of a human being. If you get a message on your birthday, saying ‘Happy birthday!’, you feel appreciated and acknowledged: this vanishes if I confess that Facebook reminded me of your special day. We know what computers are able to do, but they don’t make us feel special because they only follow algorithms. Humans make an effort. This also means that teachers will have to make an effort to personalise and differentiate materials even more than before. Quality-control guaranteed. Therefore, I doubt that an AI-run course will be a real imitation of a human-human conversation or rapport. What other targets might you have if you consider learning a language?
• AI technologies will transform schools into individual study spaces: Real or bot teachers will teach one or more students in their living space, so nobody has to leave their homes to get an education. I’ve always dreamt of a mixture of teachers and technologies, since I saw Star Wars: One day, teachers will be projected as holograms into student’s living rooms, while working from their own home (or work space). VR technologies have been able for some time to create a virtual classroom with avatars, but imagine the same without being blindfolded. Your students will be sitting as holograms on your couch, you among them, talking to each other. Crazy, but not impossible. This challenge only forces teachers to adapt their materials and way of teaching, exactly as we did when we had to go online. This change in itself is no real threat, just another challenge.
• Students will prefer AI teachers. We will have to go through this frenzy, everyone of us has watched amazing movies about robot teachers and machine friends. I will definitely try one for one of the languages I intend to study in the future. However, communication connects people with each other. When you choose your teacher (because you can and you must be able to), you choose a piece of your world. Something that you like or you would like to be similar to. So you might prefer your teacher’s origins, educational background, life experience or self-presentation. Their way of analysing problems, their positivity, easy-going nature, precision, reliability, something you want to apply in your own private or professional life. This experience can prepare you for the next presentation you need to give or a job interview you need to attend. It gives you self-confidence even in your private life to make friends or find a partner. Language is self-presentation. A machine analyses data and draws conclusions based on these. However, human unpredictability is difficult to calculate in machine-driven answers. So, just like humans do, robots will always have their limits.
• AI is able to provide live translation with authentic voice in meetings, so why would someone learn a language any more? I remember the day when I introduced myself in a first meeting saying that I was a language teacher and one of my new acquaintances replied: ‘Oh, I don’t need language teachers, my Siri speaks all the languages for me.’ She was running an international B&B successfully without speaking any languages. This was made even worse by AI voice-miming: you can even get a translation in your own voice and tone. We’re one step away from this getting embedded into video conference platforms and nobody will need a language teacher any more. This will definitely and drastically shrink the market of language learners. However, it will not demolish it. Just consider this: in life, many situations are still based on human experience where technologies are limited. Even with a robot 24/7 beside you, you will want to make decisions for yourself: you might not want to eat soup, although your AI doctor is reminding you of a healthy life-style through your devices. Nevertheless, you order chicken curry: you make decisions for yourself. In translations, there are ways of transmitting content from one language into another. The translation of the Italian word ‘viziato’ can be translated into English as ‘pampered’ or ‘spoiled’. I won’t need to explain the difference between the two translations. If your bot chooses an option for you, you are not a decision-maker. While in human-to-human communication, language is power, you give up on it and leave it to a bot. This way, language learning could become the line between people who are following and people who want to lead. We can discuss the expected quantities on both sides.
• Technologies might cause real conflicts: Well, I know little about the big world, but for me technologies offer solutions. Any time I get stuck with a fluent, but little accurate student, a voice recorder might do the work for me: listen to yourself. Any time, when my student forgets the book, we just send a picture of the exercise via IM: no more excuses. Any time a student complains about parking problems, we just move the course online: no more delays excused. All these solutions could only be enhanced by an AI. While a teacher is listening, AI could analyse patterns in mispronounced words or find the most typical grammar mistakes the student makes. This can enable the teacher to give appropriate feedback. AI might find the pdf version of the book, they are often available for customers if they bought the paperback version. The parking problem is just an excuse anyway, even traditional intelligence gets it.

Finally, you always need to consider the huge gap between human possibilities and human abilities: reality is way more basic than technology and its potentials. Even after years of online teaching, we, teachers, keep fighting with students to make them switch on their camera (and stop eating during a conversation), to mute their mic in order to cut out background noises and to answer a question straight away, googling an answer takes precious time away and 10 seconds in silence have a certain weight on the listener. We still have students who have difficulty to find the chat icon in a video call or have a camera pointed at their ears while talking to the computer screen. So at today’s moment, students might find online lessons comfortable, since they don’t have to leave their living-rooms, still they might not really take advantage of the classroom time, especially not in a group course. A great number of people are not technological, they feel uncomfortable using a computer or they might use one, but only some functions and ignore a whole lot. They might use social media, but don’t understand the mechanism behind them. There are people who just post photos on social media or click ‘Like’, but don’t know about filter bubbles or how they are profiled. Or they don’t know that their comments are visible to anyone in the future: your interviewer in a job interview very probably has already checked your online activity. We still teach basic online conduct to people: changing WhatsApp profile photos from a bikini picture to a more professional, though neutral one. Yes, we could talk about photos for ages.

As for businesses, everybody likes positive comments, but even in a work context, people often get upset if they read criticism. If your company gets a negative comment online, this is your chance to show how professional you are – to everyone in the cyber space. Make the most of the difficulty instead of sending the person to a warmer place. Personally, I’ve chosen a restaurant on many occasions based on their positive reaction to a negative comment. All of them were worth the while. So AI is a great deal to a small group of people, but most humans are still getting there to be able to use them.

AI is likely to push us away from the online world and contemporarily, make us live a more sensible online life. So, here’s my final message:

1. live offline as much as possible, enjoy real human contacts, dive into real experiences and be part of  just normal, not-augmented realities;
2. use technologies, but know their ancestors, so know how to write by hand just in case the electricity goes off;
3. be conscious about the digital imprint you leave behind: remember, AI doesn’t know human beings, it only understands online behaviour, digital imprints. Make sure you leave the ones that define you.

PS: This article was originally published on Linkedin on 23rd September 2023. Here is the original post.

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