Developing AI Literacy in L2 Education through Course Design: Insights from Exploratory Action Research

Teachers globally recognise the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid and disrupt language learning, but there is a lack of up-to-date practiced-based research within L2 education due to AI’s rapid evolution. Despite the need for such research, few teachers are ready to empirically evaluate the impact of their interventions through pre- and post-intervention data collection, limiting the publication of practice-based studies. A partial solution lies in exploratory action research (AR), which prefaces the conventional AR ‘reflect-plan-act-observe’ cycle (Kemmis/McTaggart 1988) with a period of reflection, planning, and observation to identify problems without impacting everyday teaching (Smith 2015). This article presents an exploratory AR project on a university course designed to help students build AI literacy in order to critically and creatively use AI for L2 learning. The stages presented are course design (reflection and planning), course implementation (observation and reflection), and post-course identification of issues to address in future planning (reflection for future course design). Thus, the present study ends at the beginning of the conventional AR cycle. The article makes a valuable contribution by demonstrating how emerging technologies in L2 education can be explored through exploratory AR and offers practice-related findings that may help educators design activities and courses suited to their own contexts.