Rethinking Language Education in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence: Communication, Identity, and Multilingual Futures

Dear Colleagues,

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), as an innovative tool, is changing both the tools available for language instruction and the way we communicate, read, write and construct knowledge. Although GenAI has emerged as one of the most important topics in educational research today, language education is uniquely positioned among all disciplines due to the primary objective of developing communicative competency, enhancing intercultural awareness, fostering multilingual identities, and facilitating meaningful interactions. Thus, these aspects cannot be assessed by evaluating solely technological innovations.

Rather than asking how AI can be integrated into language classrooms, this Special Issue invites researchers to explore how AI challenges fundamental assumptions about what it means to learn, teach, assess, and use languages in increasingly multilingual and digitally mediated societies. In addition to raising concerns about language acquisition, learner agency, critical AI literacies, authorship, assessments, intercultural communication, linguistic diversity, and the evolving role of the language teacher, new questions are emerging as students work with large language models which generate fluent, contextually relevant, written or spoken discourse.

This Special Issue welcomes theoretically oriented, empirically based, and practice-oriented studies that provide a comprehensive examination of the educational, linguistic, social, and ethics implications of GenAI for language education within various educational settings. Interdisciplinary studies that extend beyond the evaluation of technology acceptance to consider how GenAI is changing language learning, communication, multilingualism, and teacher professionalism will be especially welcomed.

By highlighting the unique features of language education, this Special Issue hopes to contribute toward a research agenda that supports inclusive, ethically grounded, critically aware, and pedagogically effective practices for language teaching/learning in the era of GenAI.

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Human–AI interaction in second and foreign language learning
• Generative AI and communicative competence
• AI-mediated language feedback and learner development
• Critical AI literacies in language education
• Multilingualism, translanguaging, and AI
• Intercultural communication in AI-mediated environments
• Language teacher identity and professional development in the age of AI
• Assessment of language learning in AI-rich educational contexts
• AI and language learner agency, autonomy, and motivation
• Ethical, inclusive, and responsible AI practices in language education
• AI for less commonly taught and minority languages
• Multimodal communication and language learning through AI
• Corpus-informed AI applications in language education
• Designing pedagogies for language learning beyond AI-assisted text generation

Dr. Mário Rui Domingues Ferreira da Cruz
Prof. Dr. Patrícia Ferreira
Guest Editors

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• artificial intelligence
• generative AI
• language education
• language learning
• AI literacy
• digital literacy
• teacher education
• multilingualism
• educational technology
• innovation in education