Call for Papers > Plenary Talks

Keynote Speakers: https://ceh.elach.uminho.pt/techling/

Alex Boulton, University of Lorraine, ATILF

Incorporating GenAI in language teaching

With GenAI, many teachers have gone to the extreme of abandoning marked assignments out of class, fearing they can no longer be assumed to consist entirely of student output; a return to exams has its drawbacks though. This paper briefly surveys some of the obvious strengths and weaknesses of GenAI in language teaching/learning, then presents two cases where it was incorporated into classroom work and assignments at our university in France last semester.

The first involved several hundred third-year undergraduates in Social Sciences who worked on small-group projects on a topic of their choice but connected to their studies. Investigation the previous year had found many students using GenAI inappropriately; this year, they were encouraged to use GenAI to help prepare their topic, though the written and oral marks were based partly on questions unknown in advance. We will look at language analysis from the previous cohort (Yibokou et al., 2025), the successes and failures of the new procedures, along with student feedback, among other things.

A separate situation featured an intact class of 33 first-year master’s students in Geography, again working in small groups on a disciplinary topic of their choice. Each group was required to choose at least 15 research articles for analysis using corpus linguistics tools and techniques, writing up the results on a form which made the basic work unavoidable, though they were encouraged to use GenAI to help with reading the texts and checking the language in their written submission. The presentation will draw on the completed assignments as well as a post-course questionnaire focusing on the integration of the electronic tools – AntConc and GenAI (Boulton, 2025).

In both cases, the students were motivated by the collaborative work and the trust to choose their own topic; weaker students also appreciated being allowed to use electronic tools, such that the mark was not solely for their level of proficiency in the language. GenAI is likely here to stay, but there are alternatives to embracing it wholesale or seeking to ban it entirely.

References

Boulton, A. (2025). Corpus and GenAI tools for learning language and content. EUROCALL international conference. Advancing CALL: New research agendas. Milan, 27-30 August.

Yibokou, K.S., Boulton, A., Kalyaniwala, C., & Schires, M. (2025). Spontaneous use of Generative Artificial Intelligence and influence on collaborative learner writing. Alsic, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.4000/13f6g

Biography

Alex Boulton is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics and former director of the ATILF research group (CNRS & Université de Lorraine). He is editor of ReCALL, and is on committees for several other scientific journals (Alsic, ASp, CALL-EJ, the EUROCALL Review, IJCALLT, JALT-CALL Journal) and associations (EUROCALL, TaLC and AFLA).Particular research interests centre on corpus linguistics and potential uses for ‘ordinary’ teachers and learners (aka data-driven learning – DDL), with over 100 publications including several syntheses of DDL in recent years. 

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