Mat Schulze

San Diego State University

Mat Schulze is a professor of German (Applied Linguistics) and has worked at universities in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the US. He serves as the director of the Language Acquisition Resource Center at San Diego State University, which runs a number of federally funded teacher development and language-and-culture training projects. His research interests are in Tutorial CALL, including the smart application of artificial intelligence techniques, and online language education.

The Imitation Game: Smart language learning and artificial intelligence
(July 9, 13:00-14:00 JST)

The Imitation Game (Turing, 1950) “tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent [language] behavior … indistinguishable from that of a human” (“Turing test,” 2022). Alan Turing (1948) listed the “learning of languages” as one of the ways in which computers could demonstrate their ‘intelligence’. In the context of smart CALL – the theme of this conference – it is essential to ask: How have these predictions in Computer Science been born out in the field of Language Education? What was the role and impact of (relevant) artificial intelligence techniques on research, development, and practice in CALL over the last 35 years? How smart – personalized, contextualized, and socialized – are these digital technologies in language learning today? And where do we go from here in our integration of ever-changing computational tools and approaches in CALL?

Exploring the nexus of language pedagogy, linguistics, and computer science, we will look at the nonlinear developmental and discursive trajectories in CALL. In this systematic reflective journey, five ‘technology landmarks’ will be used for our orientation:

• Regular expressions
• Machine translation
• Corrective linguistic feedback
• Augmented textuality
• Dialog systems

What impact did these technologies have on CALL research? How did they influence language-learning processes and teacher beliefs and practices? And ultimately, did the Imitation Game – the facilitation of some communicative interaction of language learners with a digital device – lead to change in Language Education?

Nobue Tanaka-Ellis

Tokai University

Nobue Tanaka-Ellis is an associate professor in Applied Linguistics at the International Education Center, Tokai University, in Japan. She holds a PhD in Computer-Assisted Language Learning/Applied Linguistics from the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include learning environment with technology, CLIL, intercultural communication, and global leadership education. She regularly presents and publishes internationally in CALL and Applied Linguistics, and she is currently the Co-Editor-in-Chief of The JALT CALL Journal.

Recapturing and redefining the smartness of CALL
(July 10, 9:30-10:30 JST)

As the world is emerging from a two-year-long pandemic, we recognize that the landscape of education has changed, and it will not go back to where we were two years ago. This also applies to language education, including Computer Assisted Language Learning. CALL quickly rose to stardom two years ago, being perceived as a viable solution to providing language education during the pandemic; however, the sparkle seems to be subdued as we are moving back to the traditional face-to-face mode. One reason for the waning popularity might be because language teachers and educational institutions now seem to perceive CALL as a synonym for emergency remote teaching. It is, therefore, our role as CALL researchers to rectify the misconception and reintroduce the smartness of CALL to the educators beyond our research community. In this talk, the smartness of CALL is discussed with emphasis on contextualization and socialization by looking at some of the recent data collected from online and face-to-face classes with great complexity in their contexts. I will also present how CALL researchers dealt with their language classes in the past two years by assessing the smartness of these classes.