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Newsletter - April 2025

Dear language educators,

This month we are proud to share a blog post written by Dr. Fred Poole, our upcoming guest instructor, titled Language Teaching with Generative AI: The Need for AI Literacies. We also want to remind you that registration is still open for the 2025 Shared LCTL Symposium in Chicago at the end of the month, and we hope to see you there!

New to our newsletter? Explore all eleven of our projects in our three core areas of professional development, open resources, and strategic collaboration on our website! 

Check out other events on our joint LRC calendar (also linked below under PD Opportunities and Resources).

Updates

Language Teaching with Generative AI: The Need for AI Literacies

Guest post by Frederick J Poole, Assistant Professor in the MSU Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching (MAFLT) and OLT Initiative’s newest instructor.

With the hype surrounding new GenAI tools and the exponential rate at which new tools are developed and advanced, it is no surprise that many industries and fields are scrambling to catch up. I’ve experienced this firsthand. In the past two years I’ve gone from giving two or three presentations/workshops a year on technology related topics to nearly 20 workshops a year on GenAI. When applied to the classroom, GenAI can be used to create novel texts for any topic of interest, graded readers, and/or lesson plans and activities. Additionally, when prompted correctly it can provide formative feedback and act as a conversational partner, among many other tasks. To put it simply, GenAI can be a catalyst for innovation in language teaching and learning.  

As language educators continue to explore GenAI tools and their uses, developing AI literacy becomes essential. Given the increasingly powerful capabilities of GenAI and the rate at which it improves, focusing on one tool or even what that one tool can do will not be fruitful. Instead, language teachers must develop AI literacies which allow them to a) understand how GenAI models work at basic level, b) create prompts that maximize the quality of output, c) apply understanding of GenAI models to critically evaluate GenAI tools, d) creatively explore use-cases of GenAI that are embedded in pedagogically sound teaching approaches, and e) understand the ethical concerns around AI.

As a reminder, applications are open for enrollment in our new course, Language Teaching with Generative AI: Harnessing AI to Elevate Instruction. Two sections of the Generative AI course will be offered this summer:

• Summer Session 1: May 19 – June 6
• Summer Session 2: July 7-25

In addition to this new course, we are also grateful to welcome back Dr. Tom Garza to lead a session of his popular course Teaching the Whole Class: Technology for Differentiated Instruction. The courses are open to teachers of all languages. Please see below for more information.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

The Shared LCTL Symposium will be held in conjunction with the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL) Annual Conference in Chicago on April 24, 2025 from 1-5:30pm!

Personnel from the Mellon Transforming Language Instruction project and the LCTL and Indigenous Languages Partnership project will review their collaborative efforts over the years of their funding with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has made SLCTLS possible over the past nine years. We will then have an exploratory panel discussion with representatives from various LCTL organizations to explore possible collaborative avenues for the future.

PD Opportunities and Resources

Many of our fellow Language Resource Centers and National Resource Centers (and some of our collaborative partners) have their own professional development opportunities. This section highlights some of those opportunities/resources.

• The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) will be offering a series of workshops as part of their Social Justice in Language Education initiative, which was developed to address the important need for professional development and instructional materials anchored in social justice and critical pedagogies. 

• CARLA also announced the schedule for their 2025 Summer Institutes for Language Teachers. For its 30th annual program, CARLA will offer ten online institutes and four in-person institutes, all of which are designed to link research and theory with practical applications for the classroom. Applications open on January 6th.
• CARLA’s new Exploring Learner Language website is adapted from an innovative workbook and video series of the same name that was designed to provide an introductory hands-on experience studying the language used by English as a second language (ESL) learners. Accompanying videos feature six adult ESL learners and (for comparison) two native speakers of English all completing the same individual and paired oral and written communication tasks. In carrying out a guided analysis of the language the learners use in these tasks, teachers can develop instructional skills in identifying their students’ language-learning needs. 
• CERCLL Webinar Series Rebooting Language Educ-AI-tion from Spring 2024 has all recordings available for reference!
• The Teaching and Learning Languages in the United States (TELL-US) podcast series is available. This resource is aimed at novice LCTL instructors with content focusing on pedagogy and school culture. 
• The Language Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has several professional development events online for this academic year, including topics surrounding proficiency-based instruction and teacher wellbeing. 
• The Cornell Language Resource Center has a podcast called "Speaking of Language" as well as a Speaker Series (with archived videos of previous events), covering topics of wide-ranging interest for language learners and instructors.
• The LCTL Program at the Ohio State University has created self-paced, asynchronous LCTL Courses on their Scarlet Canvas platform. Course options exist in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Catalan, Persian, Polish, and Romanian. 
• The CALPER program at Penn State is hosting their Spring 2025 Professional Development webinar series, revolving around "Advances in World Language Pedagogy". Register here. 
• The National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa is offering a 5-module open-enrollment self-study course for language educators beginning to learn about Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL). Register here.