The linguistic leap: Understanding, evaluating, and integrating AI in language education

The landscape of language education is undergoing a pivotal transformation, spurred by the integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) into every facet of traditional and new methodologies and practices. Given the rapid societal adoption of AI, we believe that all language instructors – from the most technologically savvy to the most tech-averse – must engage critically and ethically with AI. To ensure that AI tools are brought into language education in pedagogically appropriate and ethical ways, we have developed two large projects at our university: 1) an AI Working Group in our Modern Languages Department and 2) a chatbot that all instructors can incorporate into their classroom practices. In this article, we describe the rationale for these projects and the steps we took to implement them. We hope that this work can help other departments come together to address the challenges and achieve a balance between technological advancement and the intrinsically human facets of language education.