抖阴探探App

29 May 2026, 9:30am-5.00pm

Teacher Training Day. Re-visiting the Prompt: Critical AI Literacy for Language Educators: A day of keynote insights, active learning, and shared best practices

We are delighted to be co-organising another hybrid (online or in-person) training day with Online Confucius Institute at the Open University for teachers of Chinese as a Foreign Language, as well as teachers of other languages.

Venue:

, 抖阴探探App and online

Language:

English and Chinese

Theme

Although the theme of this one-day event is Teaching Chinese Language and Cultures in the AI Era, teachers of other languages are welcome to attend the day as the shared approaches are applicable to language teaching in general.

Programme and registration

Registration for the training day is now open and is free to attend.

Lunch and refreshments will be provided for those at the venue.

Keynote speakers

Dr Mirjam HAUCK

Professor of Critical Digital Pedagogies in the faculty of Wellbeing Education and Language Studies at the Open University, UK.

Dr KAN Qian

Director of the and Senior Lecturer in Chinese in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at The Open University, UK.

Professor XU Xin

Chinese Director of the and Associate Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU), China.

Dr SHI Lijing

A multi-award-winning academic at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK.

Joe DALE

An independent languages consultant based in the UK, working with organisations including Network for Languages, the Association for Language Learning (ALL), the British Council, BBC, Microsoft and The Guardian.

Dr Neil McLEAN

Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Language Centre, UK.

Professor Kate BORTHWICK

Professor of Digital Education at the University of Southampton, UK.

Keynote speakers' abstracts

‘AI Literacy for Social Justice and Inclusion: What does it mean for the Learning and Teaching of Languages and Cultures?’ by Professor Mirjam HAUCK (Open University)

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in language classrooms, translation workflows, cultural heritage projects, and the everyday communicative lives of learners, the question of who benefits – and who is left behind – has never been more urgent. Language and culture educators must engage with this conversation. They are, in fact, among its most important participants: because language is where AI's assumptions about knowledge, authority, and belonging are most visibly encoded, and because the teaching of languages and cultures has always been, at its best, an exercise in crossing borders, questioning norms, and learning to inhabit perspectives other than one's own.

I will argue that AI literacy is not simply a technical skill but a profoundly political and ethical practice that must be grounded in principles of social justice, equity, and inclusion if it is to serve all learners. Drawing on the Critical AI Literacy Framework developed at The Open University UK, I will explore what it means to engage with AI critically, creatively, and ethically in language and culture education in particular. Moving beyond tool fluency, Critical AI Literacy invites learners to interrogate the assumptions, biases, and power structures encoded in AI systems, and to ask not only how these tools work, but for whom, by whom, and at whose expense.

This is particularly vital for learners whose languages and cultural frameworks are poorly represented in AI training data and for communities for whom the promise of AI as a language learning tool is complicated by the reality that their languages may be under-resourced, that their communicative norms may be penalised by automated feedback systems, and that their cultural knowledge may be processed without their consent.

Informed by ubuntu philosophy – the understanding that our individual wellbeing is inseparable from collective wellbeing – I will propose that care, relationality, and interdependence should be foundational values in language and culture education. I will reflect on how decolonial and EDIA-centred approaches can reshape the way we design and facilitate AI literacy experiences in our field: ensuring that multilingualism is treated not as a problem to be solved by better translation, but as a vital epistemological resource, and that the development of AI competencies in language education does not reproduce existing hierarchies of linguistic value, but actively works to dismantle them.

‘AI literacy as an extension of ‘normal’ language provision’ by Dr Neil McLEAN (London School of Economics and Political Science)

We may be entering a new human era, which Christodoulou calls the ‘stupidogenic society’. In this society, thinking is handed off to machines, and humans become lazy and foolish. One obvious concern with this is that if these machines are, as Bender says, simply ‘stochastic parrots’, then their outputs will be wrong, or at least misapplied, and humans will not have the ability, or perhaps just the habit, to check.

What is needed then is AI literacy on the part of humans, and language centres seems extremely well-placed to offer learning in that. After all, we are used to teaching areas that AI tools struggle with, such as interpretation, ambiguity and the significance of context. This presentation presents the findings of a month-long research internship aimed at developing AI literacy. Undergraduate students were asked to use Claude (Sonnet 4) to conduct thematic, ‘rhetorical move’ and critical metaphor analyses. The internship therefore focussed students on AI literacy in areas such as familiarisation, prompting, human verification and writing. This experience offers insights into how we as language teachers could build AI literacy into our teaching, and perhaps therefore into university-wide efforts to develop this kind of literacy.

‘Building confidence and agency: a whole-institution approach to AI Fluency’ by Professor Kate BORTHWICK (University of Southampton)

AI represents both a significant opportunity and risk for language education in Higher Education. AI offers multi-modal, multifaceted support for learning, acting in roles such as study partner, co-designer or tutor (UNESCO, 2023), and enabling personalised, dialogic engagement tailored to individual needs. It can enhance inclusivity through accessible, multimodal content and support creativity by opening specialist skills to non-experts, such as in coding or graphic design. There is enormous potential for exposure to other languages and a variety of linguistic content. For educators, AI has the potential to reduce administrative workload, allowing greater focus on human interaction and skill practice. However, AI also poses challenges associated with bias, limited perspectives within training datasets and other technical flaws. In addition, research is beginning to emerge that suggests AI has an impact on cognitive development and critical thinking (Fan et al, 2025) and this has implications for how we learn, teach and assess. For Languages, AI poses a direct challenge to the nature of language learning itself, as generative AI produces the same linguistic content that learners are working to acquire. We know that effective language learning requires challenge and the development of foundational knowledge - so is AI a friend or foe?

In this talk, I will argue for the need for embedded AI Fluency training in all disciplines - and especially languages. As lead for Ai in Education for the University, I will outline the actions we have taken towards developing AI Fluency at the University of Southampton and the establishment of a whole-institution approach that acknowledges a need for every member of the University community to engage with AI. We emphasise exploration, continuous learning, collaboration (staff and students), transparency and discussion, and our aim is to build confidence and a sense of agency in how our staff and students engage with AI, through a critical and creative ethos that accepts a need for transformation in curricula and assessment. I will offer an example of how this is realised in my own postgraduate module on language teacher education. If we exercise agency and confidence in how we engage with AI, we can begin to shape the future of AI as a positive force within language education.

Fan, Y., Tang, L., Le, H., Shen, K., Tan, S., Zhao, Y., Shen, Y., Li, X., & Gaševi?, D. (2025). Beware of metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative artificial intelligence on learning motivation, processes, and performance. British Journal of Educational Technology, 56, 489–530. ??

UNESCO (2023) ‘ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education,’

‘Critical and ethical use of GenAI: exploring Chinese Language Teachers’ Perception and Attitude’ by Dr KAN Qian (Open University), Professor XU Xin (Beijing Foreign Studies University) and Dr SHI Lijing (London School of Economics and Political Science)

Since the 'sudden' arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022, Generative AI (GenAI) has entered millions of people's lives unexpectedly and brought unprecedented impacts on the educational sector. While much research explores various applications of GenAI, we are particularly interested in the critical and ethical aspects because GenAI is a disruptive technology which advances by leaps and bounds, but could also lead to irreversible harm to human societies. As teachers, we should act as a 'critical frontier' to ensure the responsible use of GenAI and minimise unintended harms. In 2025, we conducted a mixed-methods study to examine Chinese Language Teachers' perceptions of GenAI and to investigate how and why they use GenAI in their teaching.

In this presentation, we will first discuss why the critical and ethical use of GenAI should be a priority. Then, we will demonstrate how our research instruments (survey, interview, metaphor analysis) were designed to complement each other and produce research findings that go beyond what quantitative data alone could reveal. We will share our key initial research findings, discuss the implications and offer recommendations for teachers.

‘Using AI to Support Vocabulary Learning Through Stories’ by Joe DALE (Independent Consultant)

This short session explores how generative AI can be used to create engaging, level-appropriate stories that support vocabulary development in the language classroom. It will demonstrate practical workflows for producing illustrated texts, adapting content for different proficiency levels, and encouraging learners to interact creatively with new language. The examples are transferable across languages and designed to support teachers in developing confident, critical classroom use of AI tools.

Travel information

The conference will take place at 抖阴探探App.

How to contact us

Please email: ci@lancaster.ac.uk