“AI, Multimedia, & Language Teaching & Learning”
Saturday, April 6th at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX
Conference Registration – https://forms.gle/DpoVnruJ2qAmvfkV6
– Registration and one-year membership – $50.00
– Registration for attending virtual sessions is $35.00
Keynote Speakers
– Maureen Lamb, “Making AI Work for Language Teachers”
– Amanda Dalola, “Oh, the places you’ll go with #OnYGo🚀, an innovative, multimodal French OER for fostering diversity, equity and inclusion”
Conference Hotel: HOLIDAY INN EXPRESS & SUITES FORT WORTH SOUTHWEST (I-20)
Parking – The following link will show the map with highlighted Visitors’ Parking lot.
https://maps.tcu.edu/?id=1185#!ce/31111?ct/28567,32049?mc/32.707496585923586,-97.36316800117494?z/16?lvl/0
You can also park in the lot on West Cantey next to the University Christian Church. This is open on the weekend and is the closest to Scharbauer Hall. https://maps.app.goo.gl/EoaXZjeqog4C6wsV8
You can walk from the UCC parking lot to Shcarbauer Hall. https://maps.app.goo.gl/JqJungZ1vQNAcdRd6
Conference Program
Friday, April 5th
Pre-conference dinner (7 PM) Join us for a pay-your-own dinner at Press Cafe by the river.
https://www.presscafeftworth.com/
Saturday, April 6th (All in-person events will take place in Scharbauer Hall. The Zoom information will be sent out via email to the virtual conference registrants only.)
8:00 Check-in, Same day Registration, coffee, light breakfast served
Scharbauer Hall, 1st floor foyer
8:30 Welcome remarks by TCU & IALLT President – Dan Nikolai
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1008
Zoom Room 1
9:00-9:45 Keynote: Maureen Lamb “Making AI Work for Language Teachers”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1008
Zoom – Room 1
10:00 Session 1 (concurrent sessions)
– Steve Przymus, “Easy de Traducir: Geomapping the Linguistic Landscape of Fort Worth Texas for Uncovering and Addressing Linguistic Ideologies”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1008
Zoom – Room 1
– Regina Kaplan-Rakowski, “How Can Virtual Reality Help Language Learners?”
Room: Scharbauer Hall
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1010
Zoom – Room 2
10:30-11:00 coffee break/vendor visit #1
11:00 Session 2 (concurrent sessions)
– Lourdes Bueno, “Short but not Senseless”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1008
Zoom – Room 1
– Mike Dettinger “Measuring Students’ Perceptions on AI and Its Impact on Learning a Foreign
Language”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1010
Zoom – Room 2
11:40 Session 3 (concurrent sessions via remote)
– Jerry Parker, “The Knowledge Development Model in World Language Courses: Theory to Practice”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1008
Zoom – Room 1
– Taegan Holmes, “ChatGPT for Interactive Written Corrective Feedback in French as Second Language Learning and Teaching “
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1010
Zoom – Room 2
12:20 – 1:20 Lunch (provided) & Business Meeting w/ Officer Elections!
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1008
Zoom – Room 1
1:30 – 2:30 Keynote: Amanda Dalola “Oh, the Places You’ll Go with #OnYGo🚀, an Innovative, Multimodal French OER for Fostering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1010
Zoom – Room 2
2:30 -3:00 Coffee break/vendor visit #2
3:00-3:30 Session 4 (vendor session)
– Hope Anderson, “Increase Student Comprehension with Lesson Magic!” (Teaching Solved LLC)
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1010
Zoom – Room 2
3:40-4:10 Session 5:
– Hajime Kumahata, “Deploying Meta Quest VR Goggles in Classroom Teaching”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1008
Zoom – Room 1
– Edna Velásquez, “Digital Reading Communities for Academic Spanish”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 1010
Zoom – Room 24:20 – 5:00 Workshop
– Louise Stoehr, “The Art of Prompt Engineering: Unleashing the Power of GenAI for 21st-Century Language Learning ”
Room: Scharbauer Hall 3004
Zoom – Room 1
5:00-5:20 Closing Remarks
Room: Scharbauer Hall 3004
Zoom – Room 1
Post Conference Dinner7 PM
Everyone is invited to join us at the Post-Conference dinner at Los Vaqueros – https://losvaqueros.com/
This is a pay-your-own dinner. We estimate the cost to be around $15.00 – $20.00 for food plus drinks.
Presentation Abstracts
Taegan Holmes – ChatGPT for Interactive Written Corrective Feedback in French as Second Language Learning and Teaching
“Although artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new subject, its current implications are a topic garnering much interest. Given recent advances in AI, its involvement in second language teaching and learning has become a topic that requires attention. AI tools capable of generating original content based on databases are becoming increasingly widespread, and consequently it is imperative to take a critical look at their potential impact in educational settings.
This empirical study conducted with university students enrolled in a French as a Second Language class explores how generative artificial intelligence (specifically ChatGPT) can be used for interactive and adaptable written corrective feedback. Students submitted a short text to ChatGPT and then engaged with the tool to obtain written corrective feedback. Students were asked to enter into a conversation with ChatGPT in order to understand its proposed corrections and they were encouraged to challenge ChatGPT if they felt that the tool had made an error, thus furthering the interactive nature of the correction process. Transcripts of students’ interactions with ChatGPT were analyzed to assess how students interacted with the tool. Students also filled out a pre-task questionnaire about their digital writing and correcting practices as well as a post-task questionnaire pertaining to their experience using ChatGPT for written corrective feedback.
Findings from this study suggest that the textual revision practices of the participants are heterogeneous, yet a majority of students expressed positive sentiments towards the experience in the post-task questionnaire.”
Hope Anderson – Increase Student Comprehension with Lesson Magic!
Come get ideas for how to make readings and videos more comprehensible by previewing vocabulary, grammar, and cultural concepts through interactive activities. Your activities will help students develop proficiency in multiple modes so you can spend less time searching and more time getting students speaking, listening, and interacting! You will get to try out Lesson Magic’s free search engine to easily find materials for Spanish, French, and English and pair them with our activity ideas. You will get ideas for sequencing and scaffolding lesson activities, incorporating task-based language teaching principles to get students actively using the language while previewing vocabulary, grammar, and cultural concepts that come from readings and videos. By participating in and creating these activities, participants in this session will better understand the student experience and be able to take techniques and materials back to their own classrooms.
Steve Przymus – Easy de Traducir: Geomapping the Linguistic Landscape of Fort Worth Texas for Uncovering and Addressing Linguistic Ideologies
How languages are used in public spaces (our linguistic landscape) influences how individuals feel about those languages and by default the speakers of those languages. These thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, etc. are known as language ideologies and language ideologies are some of the greatest influences and predictors of how people are positioned, treated, valued, and given or not given opportunities for power and success in a community. Fort Worth, Texas, is the 13th largest city by population in the United States and at 32%, Hispanic or Latine individuals make up the second largest ethnicity in the city. And although Spanish is frequently heard in many parts of Fort Worth and found on private shop signs in historically Mexican-American neighborhoods, the explicit and very public display of written Spanish in the linguistic landscape (e.g., billboards) of Fort Worth is not representative in number of the percentage of Latine individuals nor is it thematically balanced with the themes found on English billboards. Using the geopmapping app Lingscape we have discovered a surprising and potentially influential pattern of primarily using the Spanish language on Fort Worth billboards to advertise for alcohol companies. We argue that this could send a clear (albeit unconscious), unspoken message of the place, value, and role of Spanish in Fort Worth. We worry about the impact this might have on how Spanish-speaking or Hispanic/Latine youth are viewed in schools, potentially leading to negative stereotypes and more problematic representations of these students.
Jerry Parker – The Knowledge Development Model in World Language Courses: Theory to Practice
The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the usage of the Knowledge Development Model (Adams, 2017) along with best practices in Open Pedagogy, including Open Educational Resources, to design and facilitate asynchronous world language courses. The Knowledge Development Model was created as an approach to teaching in virtual spaces. It aims to have students acquire, apply, and generate new knowledge while also being cognizant of furthering student ownership of learning and employing a range of instructional strategies. This presentation will provide an overview of the Knowledge Development Model and show examples of how it is being used to facilitate courses. This presentation will also provide participants with information on how to get started with the model and some tips and tricks for adapting its use with more sophisticated forms of technology such as Artificial Intelligence.
Lourdes Bueno – Short but Not Senseless
“Technology has completely changed our world. It has impacted almost every aspect of humans´ lives; sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. One of those aspects is, undeniably, education. The time of using VCRs, cassette players, or overhead projectors in classrooms is long gone. Now we have laptops, smartboards, Internet, and, of course, AI.
Most current university students have different expectations than the students we had some years ago. From an early age, they became familiar with tablets, video games, audiobooks, and cell phones instead of dolls, cars, or printed books. That is the reason we, as educators, need to find the correct tools to attract and engage our students when teaching at college/university level.
One tool that offers some important qualities that still attract young people are short films. They have impactful visual elements (sometimes related to famous people such as movie characters or popular singers they already know), modern music, social issues that matter to them, and (what is most important) everything is wrapped in a short-time format. In this presentation, I will discuss some shorts that, being used in either lower, intermediate, and advanced Spanish classes, are able to appeal to the students in an entertaining and attractive way.”
Edna Velásquez – Digital Reading Communities for Academic Spanish
This study explores interactive digital reading as a pedagogical activity for the development of academic reading and writing in mixed advanced Spanish classes. Forty students enrolled in two online writing courses participated in this experience. In these courses, which included students of Spanish as a heritage and as a second language, Perusall, a free electronic reading platform, was utilized to collaboratively and asynchronously comment on assigned readings. Students were required to engage with the texts uploaded on the platform and interact with them and their classmates using the various communication tools provided by the website. The goal was to characterize the types of interactions that benefit students and their perception of collaborative annotations. A preliminary analysis of the results suggests a positive evaluation by the participants regarding the activity. Furthermore, there was an increase in interactions with the text and among peers over the semester. A greater growth in the latter indicates that this activity promotes the creation of a virtual community of readers, contributing to the improvement of both reading comprehension and academic writing. The study concludes with recommendations for implementing this task in both face-to-face and online or hybrid courses.
Hajime Kumahata – Deploying Meta Quest VR Goggles in Classroom Teaching
(Work in progress presentation) Interactive Media and Language Center at Baylor deployed 20 Meta Quest2 VR Goggles for language learning and teaching in the classroom. For the initial launch, students from two classes of the fourth-semester Japanese language classes utilized them once every two weeks. We will discuss and explore how VR technology can enhance language learning by providing an immersive and interactive environment that engages students in the learning process (Garduno, et al., 2021), how VR can enrich the learning context by providing entertainment features that make learning more enjoyable and engaging (Liu et al., 2020), and how VR in language learning can overcome some of the limitations of traditional teaching methods and provide new opportunities for language learners (Graeske & Sjoberg, 2021). We will conclude with challenges for supporting such technology at a language center.
Regina Kaplan-Rakowski – How Can Virtual Reality Help Language Learners?
The rapid advancement of high-immersion virtual reality (VR) has opened new horizons in how language learners can practice their language skills. This presentation will report on outcomes of several research projects that explored the potential of VR to improve various language skills and competencies. The presenter will provide a brief overview of VR technology, highlighting its advantages and its pitfalls. Several projects will be discussed and specific examples of language learning activities will be showcased. To increase the understanding of VR for language learning, the attendees will be able to be involved in hands-on activities. The ultimate goal of this presentation is to provide insights into how VR can be effectively harnessed to enhance language learning, offering recommendations for educators, technologists, and curriculum developers interested in incorporating immersive technologies into language education.
Michael Dettinger – Measuring Students’ Perceptions on AI and Its Impact on Learning a Foreign Language
This mixed methods pilot study explores student and faculty perceptions on the impact of Artificial Intelligence when integrated into a German language course during the 2024 spring semester. I divided the language course into two groups: an AI-Integrated course and a traditional course (control). The AI course infuses ChatGPT (for written assistance, cultural exploration, and project task completion), and the Virtual Reality program ImmerseMe (for pronunciation and speaking). Participants in the AI-infused course will complete a Likert-type survey with open-ended questions and a focus group to help provide a deeper understanding of the effects of AI.
Workshop Abstract
Louise Stoehr – The Art of Prompt Engineering: Unleashing the Power of GenAI for 21st-Century Language Learning
“The quality of any final product is only as good as the input provided. The old computer programming adage “garbage in, garbage out” still holds true today, not only in computer science. And this is especially the case for generative AI tasked with synthesizing personalized materials aimed to enhance language learning. LLMs (Large Language Models) need specific instruction in order to produce useful, engaging activities for language learners at all levels. The good news is that prompt engineering is easy, can feed our human creative desires, and it is fun!
Bring your laptop or tablet, and join us in this hands-on workshop where you will learn to create well-designed prompts for generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. At the end of our session, you will have a new set of tools for unleashing the potential of GenAI to generate materials you can use to support all levels of language teaching.”
