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. 

Geoffrey Williams & Emmanuelle Pensec

Universities of Grenoble-Alpes & Bretagne Sud

The role of humanities in achieving sustainable development goals:
Bridging Culture, Technology, and Inclusivity

“Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds”,

J. R. Oppenheimer, father of the Atomic bomb, quoting the Bhagavad Gita in 1945 after the first test explosion at Los Alamos.

By definition, the humanities are concerned by the activities, social, cultural, economic of humans. We are users, and not creators of technology, but our responsibility is vast as only the humanities can judge whether technology is good, or not, for humanity, and whether it is sustainable in the sense of preserving the environment, in its widest sense, necessary for our survival as a species. The humanities have the role of deciding whether the outcomes of science and technology are legal and ethical. As such, the *Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations can only be evaluated through the humanities as they are about humanity.

In this paper, we shall look at the SDG as a template for valorising humanities research. The SDG will be seen as a means of demonstrating the key roles of the humanities across the board and not as a constraint into which they are destined to fit. This will be illustrated through case studies into two research units to show how funded projects provide input to different SDGs. This will clearly show how our ethical choices in terms of, for example, technological choices and inclusivity valorise our research choices a posteriori and can contribute to the overall ranking of institutions.

*Sustainable Development Goals — a set of 17 global goals adopted by the United Nations to promote prosperity while protecting the planet, with a target date of 2030.

 Enrica Piccardo, University of Toronto, OISE

Amit Moryossef

University of Zurich

Advancements in Sign Language Processing: Bridging Communication Gaps with Technology

Ângela Ferreira

Minho University, EAAD and Lusofona University

Integrating Indigenous Art and Artificial Intelligence: Exploring Opportunities and Challenges