October 2023 - I might be out of a job soon, thanks to AI — at least, that's what some AI developers seem to suggest. Some technological advances really have revolutionised our lives, so perhaps we language teachers had better start learning programming languages ourselves. In the meantime, though, I'd like to make the case for why language teachers are still necessary. This article aims to show a few examples where the human factor outweighs numeric data, where even today's computers simply can't replace a person. I'll focus on entry testing — the first encounter between a teacher and a student — and, in particular, on motivation to learn a language.
Smart parents grow smart kids
This week, I've had the pleasure of chatting with several parents about teaching, language courses, textbooks, their children's progress and, more broadly, the future. I'm delighted to see that more and more so-called "average" people are proving remarkably sensible when it comes to investment decisions: they want their children to speak languages. However, while just ten years ago the main reason for enrolling children in a language course was to help them move abroad one day, today parents cite a different motivation: helping them become better professionals. Parents are getting savvier — they also want courses for their children that actually deliver results.
I remember my first day as a Didactic Coordinator, talking to an upset mother who showed me her daughter's English books: one from the current year, and one from the year before. She'd noticed that all the topics were exactly the same — her child wasn't learning anything new. The difference between the two books amounted to around forty lexical items; she had counted them herself. She was right, and she'd also spotted one of the biggest problems in YL (Young Learner) teaching: children are often taught the A1-level syllabus for years on end — at least four, and in many schools even more. They learn numbers, colours and animals, and then start again from the top. A parent who takes the time and care to compare language books like that deserves to be taken seriously. Her request was to move her daughter up at least one level. Company policy meant I couldn't do that — not on my first day, at least.
At the time, and in many schools even today, the main factor in deciding a child's level is simply their age, or they're enrolled on a course purely because their friends are doing it too.
My own children speak decent English (though they're native Italian speakers), and as much as I love teaching them myself, I chose to enrol them in language schools instead, so they'd commit to their own teachers and classmates. Last year, they spent a year at a school with an excellent professional standard, but very little personal attention (my son kept complaining that his teacher repeatedly forgot to give him his reward certificate). So this year, I did some research, and my children went through a series of entry tests. An entry test, as it turns out, is also an excellent way to test the teaching staff giving it. Less experienced teachers tend to test a checklist of grammar structures and base their decisions purely on those: for example, if a student doesn't use the simple past, they must be at Movers level, since the simple past is introduced at that stage. Fair enough — but did the student actually understand your use of the simple past (passive knowledge), or did you have to elicit the meaning of the structure yourself (a genuine gap in knowledge)?
Experienced teachers ask very different questions, and check for far more than grammar alone:
They test problem-solving skills. Did the child freeze when they didn't know a word or an answer? Did they switch into their mother tongue, or did they play along? When a student is asked how busy their afternoons are and answers that their afternoons are "incasinated", you know they understand past participles and have real capacity for improvisation (the word they were reaching for was "messed up", borrowed from the Italian and given English grammar). If a Young Learner can ask for something to be repeated, or explain a word they can't quite recall, you can no longer consider them A1 level.
They look at the child's schedule. Is the child overloaded with after-school activities? This directly affects how much time they can realistically give to homework or coursework.
They check the child's motivation. Do they want to learn the language, or are they being made to? Some children would rather be at football training than in an English class — a good teacher can use that as material for future lessons.
They look at the parents. Two students with similar profiles can perform very differently, simply because one has support at home and the other doesn't. A parent who speaks other languages sets an excellent example and provides real motivation. Their attention and interest are the best help any teacher could ask for. In testing terms: these children can generally cope with a higher level. A student with busy, uninterested or less language-confident parents, on the other hand, will very probably — I stress, very probably — need more support and more time.
All of this can change over the course of the year: what no teacher can judge at a first meeting is the real potential a Young Learner has. Adjustments through the year are therefore necessary, though extremely difficult in practice within a school environment, largely for financial reasons. If a student moves up to another group, they'll need new materials, which the school has to provide free of charge, and the school also loses a year's income from a paying client at their original level. On top of that, moving one student up risks triggering a wave of other parents demanding the same "promotion" for their own children. These are the reasons schools tend to be reluctant to let students skip levels.
Testing adults is about reading between the lines
Adults have clearly defined CEFR levels and a wide range of teaching materials, general or specialised, yet assessing them is no less challenging. Partly, this is down to uneven skills — it's common, for instance, for adult students to have strong reading comprehension but very weak listening skills — but mostly, it comes down to self-esteem.
Language is self-presentation. The real difficulty with any accomplished adult (a doctor, a lawyer, a businessperson) starting at A1 level isn't teaching them grammar, or insisting on using only the target language in class — it's their frustration at not being able to express themselves. I recently attended an interview to enrol on a Spanish course, and it was paralysing, nerve-racking and infuriating trying to answer a simple question about my daily routine using 5% Spanish, 45% Italian and 50% English. Every teacher should experience this feeling at least once.
So language teaching is only partly about grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and so on. It's about handling people's self-esteem — a delicate balancing act around emotions, self-perception, good days and bad days, requiring huge reserves of attention, empathy and compassion.
Imagine, for a moment, asking someone to introduce themselves, and they answer: "Hello, my name is zzzz, I'm a medical doctor at the University of..., and a researcher at..." This kind of introduction — where someone pronounces their name clearly but reels off a long, detailed list of titles — tells a teacher a great deal. This is someone who is an expert in one or more fields, and who is likely to feel considerable frustration in a learning situation. Giving them ready-to-use language is key here. On the other hand, such students also tend to over-analyse the target language and lose themselves comparing it to their first language. A more structured methodology and consistent lesson routine can help reassure them of their own progress.
Language teaching also means a constant battle against certain false beliefs. Let me name just a few:
"English is an easy language." This is typical of students who get stuck at A2/B1 level, because they oversimplify the language and rely only on a basic register — simple tenses, pre-intermediate vocabulary, basic linking words. Whether a language feels easy or difficult really depends on how close or distant it is from the learner's own mother tongue. But every language has its own areas of difficulty, so none can honestly be called "easy".
"I'm terrible at learning languages." This is a genuine self-esteem issue and needs to be handled carefully. Students who believe this are pre-emptively excusing an expected failure — they're preparing to fail. But this belief has nothing to do with their actual ability. Most such students succeed perfectly well with an attentive teacher.
"Grammar doesn't matter — you just put words together." As a linguist, I have to disagree. Yes, you can get by with simple grammar at pre-intermediate level (see the first point above). But English is a context-driven language: a significant part of any message is carried in the grammatical form, not just the vocabulary. If a student says "I will study more for the next lesson" versus "I'm going to study more for the next lesson", they're sending two quite different messages. A simple sentence like "I have never seen such a nice house", transformed into "Never have I seen such a nice house", carries the same words but with added emotional emphasis. We could go on about this for a very long time. So naturally, a student who arrives holding this belief also shapes the long-term plan for the whole course.
"You can't speak a language without perfect grammar." This is the opposite extreme, and it's a genuine burden, because it often stops people from speaking at all. They spend so long thinking about the structure that they never actually form the sentence, mistakes and all. As long as there's silence, a teacher has very little to work with. The moment there's an utterance, teachers can spot patterns in the mistakes, help students notice them, encourage self-correction, and finally help them avoid the mistake altogether — in that order.
"My mother tongue is really difficult." Italian students often say this, usually when they spot a similarity between Italian and English that turns out not to line up properly (present perfect versus passato prossimo, for instance). I'm a native Hungarian speaker myself, and Hungarian really is one of the strangest languages on Earth, so I learnt very early on not to go looking for similarities. Learning Italian was neither especially easy nor especially hard — it's a fairly logical language (barring prepositions and a few plural forms), it allows flexible word order, offers a generous range of compatible tenses, and a rich vocabulary to draw on. What people really mean by that statement isn't about their mother tongue being hard in itself — it's that it differs from the target language, making parallel structures harder and harder to find. Leaving the student's first language behind sooner rather than later can help shift this mindset.
There's a well-known German saying: *Sprache ist Macht* — language is power. That, ultimately, is what language teaching is about: empowering people.
Why do you want to learn a language?
As I mentioned earlier, parents' reasons for enrolling their children in English courses are changing, and so are adults' reasons for taking up a language. Here are some of the most significant:
- genuine job requirements (communicating with clients or colleagues in English, or giving presentations in English);
- a job interview, or simply a more competitive CV;
- travel or relocation;
- mental exercise;
- a positive space — somewhere they feel a genuine sense of accomplishment.
While the first three are well understood, the last two are less widely recognised, yet increasingly relevant to language teaching today. There's a growing group of people looking for somewhere they can think, express opinions, debate ideas, "broaden their horizons", or simply feel bravi — good, accomplished. To put the core message another way: learning a language trains critical thinking, sharpens the mind, and can even improve performance in other areas, such as programming, public speaking or teamwork. Learning a language also gives you a space where you're allowed to make mistakes, understand them, and eventually correct them. Once you've mastered that, applying the same approach to any other flaw becomes far easier.
As Dr Evelina Galaczi, Director of Research for Cambridge University Press & Assessment English, put it: teaching and learning are fundamentally about people, and AI cannot replace the social and emotional side of learning.
I couldn't agree more.
"You'll never have to learn a foreign language ever again."
I'd like to bring all this back to a new app that transforms any video into another language, adjusting lip movements to match.
Say I have a short video and want to try this app out — what might I actually use it for?
It's a fantastic tool for content creators. I'm already picturing a video series in Arabic about my teaching business — I might even pick up some new online students, and I hear certain Arabic-speaking markets pay rather better than the European one. Jokes aside, it really is a remarkable piece of technology.
That said, its usefulness is extremely limited:
You can't use it for a video CV. It would be deeply embarrassing to turn up to a job interview and start hesitantly stringing together basic sentences, having set expectations far too high about your language skills beforehand.
You can't use it to make friends. I can already picture Adam Sandler in a scene where he tries to chat someone up using this app (any Hollywood directors reading this who fancy the idea, feel free to DM me about a commission).
You can't use it to seem smarter. As far as I understand, all it does is translate what you say into another language — you still need the substance to say something worthwhile in the first place. For that, a language course can genuinely help, offering new stimuli, ideas, and a bit of healthy pressure to actually think things through.
And it certainly won't help you grow as a person, or develop any soft skills. The frustration of not understanding something will still be there. It won't help you overcome your shyness about speaking to strangers. And you'll likely never discover the full richness of your own personality without a teacher, and fellow students, to help you along the way.
So I'd like to put a challenge to whichever human wrote that slogan: could you ask your AI for a better one? That particular line shows a pretty poor grasp of how language teaching and learning actually work. Don't write us off so easily — we offer a great deal more than pretend videos ever could.
PS: I sincerely hope some computer scientists out there are working on AI aimed at solving real problems — climate change, poverty caused by unjust distribution of resources, the plastic crisis, cybercrime (!), bullying, and so on. It worries me that so many of the applications being promoted for this new technology revolve around fake identities and pretending to be smarter than we really are.*
PS: This article was originally published on LinkedIn on 1 October 2023.
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