Jeremy Harmer ELT

“I first encountered the term Artificial intelligence (AI) in the early 1980s,” writes Nicky Hockly in her recent book Essentials for Using Artificial Intelligence (Hockly 2024: vii) and as she points out “With the amount of hype and hysteria that surrounded the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, you’d be forgiven for thinking that AI is a completely new technology. Not so.” (ibid:2). She goes on to say that early iterations such as CALL (computer assisted language learning) were the first ‘primitive’ (my word) attempts at what became an increasing advance in machine-driven tools for learners and teachers, from exercise generation (fill-ins etc) to automatic marking of exercises. How quaint that now seems. As Dom Thurbon pointed out, in a plenary for English Australia many years ago “change is slow until it isn’t,” and suddenly it feels as if this new generative technology is in danger of taking over the world. Consider the facts: on April 13 this year (2025) ChatGPT 4.5 passed the Turing test – designed to sift out technology from humankind and a recent short story in which a new AI creative writing model was asked to write meta fiction about grief from the point of view of AI was genuinely affecting. How scared should we be when algorithms can do in a few seconds what it took Kazuo Ishiguro years of work and 352 pages to do in his wonderful novel Klara and the sun? Maybe, as Alan McKenzie suggested at the 2025 IATEFL conference (McKenzie 2025) somewhat provocatively?, we won’t need teachers anymore and when we consider what is happening on the USA it is not fanciful to suggest that Elon Musk and his ilk would love to replace noisy, awkward teachers with profit-generating machines. And when will AI take over the world?

What does the language teaching community think of all this, and how scared or excited should we be – as teachers, materials writers, curriculum planners or indeed learners? 

Considering all this I thought it might be worth tracking some opinions across the annual IATEFL conferences. IATEFL www.iatefl.org – in case you are unaware of this – is the Internation Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) and organises, every year, a conference attended by teachers from literally all over the world.

I first became properly aware of AI in language teaching at the 2023 IATEFL conference when at the end of his plenary presentation Evan Frendo, an expert in maritime English (amongst other things) told us how he got ChatGPT to write typical maritime English dialogues because it saved him so much time! A year later ((IATEFL 2024) Vicky Saumell, in a wonderful overview of the topic, pointed out the appalling environmental impact of the smallest AI task from the massive overuse of electrical energy to the vast waste of water  it provokes .

A year later and the profession is still trying to work out its stance on this ‘new’ (see above) technology. For example Rachel Tonelli and Ilka kastka from North Eastern university, USA, report on mixed reactions from the teachers they followed in their study They conclude that “In sum, building a community of supportive practitioners is more important than ever as we teach in unknown territory and prepare students for an AI-driven future that is still uncertain..

Meanwhile other teachers are using AI to plan lessons (one publisher even demonstrated its own ‘Smart lesson generator’ at this year’s conference) to write grammar exercises, to mark written work (because it saves us hours of time when we could be watching TV or playing the guitar!), to incorporate into lessons (I got AI to write a song and built a lesson sequence round that for students to work on collaboratively Harmer 2025), to plan an extensive reading programme and provide level- and subject-appropriate material (Collins 2025), to have students summarise texts (though why this better than having students do it themselves is a moot point) and a host of other possibilities.

Two final observations: in his book on Lesson Design Scott Thornbury writes “…think of AI as an assistant – an incredibly fast and resourceful one admittedly – but not the creative genius capable of designing a lesson for a particular group of students on a particular day…” (Thornbury, S 2024:62). At a forum in Edinburgh Sandy Millin , exasperated by the obsessive focus on AI in a multi-topic question and answer session protested “Can’t we stop talking about just AI? There are so many other things to talk about in education!” (those probably weren’t her actual words so I hope she’ll forgive me, but that’s the message I heard!)

Now it’s over to you. Where do you stand on the subject of AI? Brave New World or End of the world? Angel or devil?

References:

Collins, C (2025)  Using AI to develop an extensive reading curriculum. (Paper presented at the IATEFL conference, Edinburgh)

Harmer, J (2025) When we sing together (Workshop presented at the IATEFL conference Edinburgh)

Hockly, N (2024) 30 Essentials for Using Artificial Intellgence. Cambridge University Press and Assessment.

Mackenzie, A (2025) The future of CPD? (Paper presented at the IATEFL Conference, Edinburgh)

Tenelli, R & Kastka, I (2024) International Journal of TESOL Studies (2024)
Vol. 6 (3) 77-94 https://doi.org/10.58304/ijts.20240306  

Thornbury, S (2024) 66 Essentials of Lesson Design. Cambridge university press and Assessment