Richard Pinner is an EFL Teacher, Teacher Trainer and eLearning Consultant for Language Teaching. He has published various articles about language learning and is the founder of uniliterate.
In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), the necessity of learning English is being questioned. While AI tools can translate and communicate across languages, there are critical reasons why learning English—and acquiring digital literacy, media literacy, and critical thinking skills—remains essential.
The Role of AI in Language
AI advancements have made text generation highly convincing, often indistinguishable from human writing. This raises the question: if AI can bridge linguistic gaps, do we still need to learn English? The answer is yes, and here’s why.
Beyond Basic Language Skills
Learning English is not just about acquiring a tool for communication; it’s about understanding cultural nuances and context that AI cannot fully capture. Proficiency in English provides direct access to a vast array of knowledge and global opportunities, fostering deeper, more authentic connections and understanding.
Critical and Digital Literacy
In today’s digital age, knowing English alone isn’t enough. Digital literacy, media literacy, and critical thinking are crucial. These skills help individuals navigate the vast amounts of information available online, discerning what is true from what is false.
Understanding Information Types
Misinformation: This is false information spread without the intent to deceive. For example, someone sharing an incorrect fact believing it to be true.
Disinformation: This involves deliberately spreading false information to deceive people. This is often seen in political propaganda.
Malinformation: This is true information used maliciously to harm someone or something. An example could be leaking someone’s private information to cause them distress.
The Importance of English in the Post-Truth Era
In the post-truth era, where personal beliefs often overshadow factual accuracy, English literacy combined with digital literacy is vital. Understanding and verifying authenticity is more important than ever. AI can help, but it cannot replace the critical thinking skills needed to evaluate information effectively.
Conclusion
AI is transforming communication, but it cannot replace the nuanced understanding and critical skills that come from learning English. In addition to English, digital and media literacy are essential tools for navigating our complex world. By equipping ourselves with these skills, we can better discern reality from misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, ensuring we remain informed and connected in the digital age.
Open Campus Lecture: Authenticity and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
A demo lecture by Richard Pinner held at Sophia University’s Yotsuya Campus on 02/08/24 11:30-12:15
This 45-minute lecture in English will look at the issues of Authenticity in relation to AI (Artificial Intelligence). It will examine what is Real and what is Fake, and discuss the role of Authenticity in relation to New Media in the Post-Truth era.
Check below for the digital handout and other content links
After the talk I will upload another version with the video and audio of the full talk.
Here is a video version of the talk I recorded in my hotel room after the event.
There was a video recording of the actual talk, but sadly the last part was missed out. I have an audio of the event too so I am working on splicing them together to try and re-create the video, so please keep checking back for more details.
In a few days I will be presenting at the ELT Research in Action Conference in the amazing city of Barcelona!!!
Here is the program
My talk, entitled “AuthenticAIty: Where do we go from here?” is the opening plenary. Richard Sampson and I will also be doing a workshop later in the conference schedule about Intuition and Practitioner Research (see our Special Issue of the JPLL for more on this subject).
Shortly after the talk, my slides will be available to view at the following address
Whilst a great deal of research within the teaching research nexus is done on or with teachers, clearly some of the most emic insights into classrooms come in the form of practitioner research. The need to present research as something polished and finished that meets the requirements of academic journals can lead to a ‘distancing effect’ (Ushioda, 2021), and may create a divide between the two activities where the nexus meets. Furthermore, there is a tendency for published research to further distance itself from reality by presenting only the sanitized and ‘ideal’ version of the process and findings (Rose & McKinley, 2017).
In this presentation, I reflect upon my own journey to becoming a practitioning researcher by discussing one of the projects I have undertaken which was every bit as much part of my teaching as it was part of my research. I will discuss how conducting this research helped me broaden my horizons and develop as a practitioner. I will discuss the types of data and evidence that I collected in order to question any assumptions about my practice, thus allowing me to arrive at more solid and evidence-based conclusions (Walsh & Mann, 2015).
During this short talk, I will explain what I do in my classes and how I make my research a part of my teaching practice by employing an approach that utilises elements of autoethnography, exploratory practice and evidence-based reflective practice. I will mainly describe some of the methods I employ in day-to-day classes and how data is generated as a natural by-product of the type of teaching I do. I will also comment briefly on why I feel this is also an ethical approach and why it can benefit my students and my own practice as both a teacher and a researcher.
Rose, H., & McKinley, J. (2017). The realities of doing research in applied linguistics. In J. McKinley & H. Rose (Eds.), Doing research in applied linguistics: Realities, dilemmas and solutions (pp. 3-14). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Ushioda, E. (2021). Doing Complexity Research in the Language Classroom: A Commentary. In R. J. Sampson & R. S. Pinner (Eds.), Complexity perspectives on researching language learner and teacher psychology. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Walsh, S., & Mann, S. (2015). Doing reflective practice: a data-led way forward. ELT Journal, 69(4), 351-362. doi:10.1093/elt/ccv018
I attended JALT CALL 2023 in the beautiful city of Kumamoto, and gave a presentation entitled “Me and My Memes: EFL students’ memes and their role in participatory culture.”
Abstract
Memes are the “lingua franca” of the internet (Milner, 2016), and there is a small but growing body of research using memes with EFL learners (Harshavardhan et al, 2019). In this talk, I share some of my own practical experiences using memes in Japanese university classes. Students find and share memes, as well as creating and sharing their own. The values and potential pitfalls of this are discussed practically, and some preliminary data about students’ reflections and experiences of using memes are presented to begin a discussion on the potential place that memes might have in the EFL classroom. Initial response show that students found making their own memes to be a rewarding experience that gave them a connection to participatory culture (Jenkins et al, 2009).
Harshavardhan, V., Wilson, D., & Kumar, M. V. (2019). Humour discourse in internet memes: An aid in ESL classrooms. Asia Pacific Media Educator, 29(1), 41-53.
Milner, R. M. (2016). The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Weigel, M., Clinton, K., & Robison, A. J. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Presentation to be given on June 4th at 10:00-30 at Kumamoto-Jo Hall, Room A3 (Front).
Hello and thank you for coming to the symposium at AILA2021 about Practitioner Research. If you didn’t pay the (astronomical) fees for the conference, don’t worry – our symposium will be available after the event for free to everyone. We can also continue the discussion here, or on a social network of your choice (as long as it’s Twitter).
The dulcet tones of my favourite Aussie, Richard Sampson, will be a delight to all as our Featured Speaker. His video about Complexity, L2 Learner Psychology, and Practitioner Research even features his own musical composition as BGM!
This symposium brings together teachers engaged in research, who can offer valuable insights into their own practices and provide a more nuanced and contextually specific cross-section into their classrooms utilising various methods suited to practitioner-research.
Ushioda’s ‘small lens’ approach to researching classroom phenomena was originally intended to focus on motivation with a ‘more sharply focused or contextualised angle of inquiry’ (2016: 566). This can be achieved by utilising various established and emerging practitioner-based research methodologies which utilise a methodical and evidence-based design in order to gain emic insights into the language learning classroom. In this symposium, researchers will utilise a small lens approach to examine a range of psychological and social factors relating to classroom dynamics focusing on both learners and teachers, such as emotions, identity, motivation, autonomy, values and beliefs.
Research done by practitioning teachers is strongly advocated in the literature on complexity paradigm approaches, both within education (Davis and Sumara, 2008) and SLA (Larson-Freeman and Cameron, 2008). As the field of applied linguistics is reshaped by a tendency toward more situated and complexity-informed ways of understanding, insights from practitioner research are also gaining traction. The complex social dynamics that emerge inside specific classrooms are still rare and under-reported within applied linguistics, and this symposium aims to provide a springboard to learn from more emic perspectives from inside language learning classrooms.
In this Webinar, Ema Ushioda, Richard Sampson and Richard Pinner discuss the issues surrounding Complexity Theory and conducting research on language learning and teaching. In this 90-minute Webinar, Ema Ushioda, Richard Sampson and Richard Pinner discuss how complexity perspectives to language learning can be researched with a focus on making sense of complex and unpredictable phenomena. We discuss how the Complexity Lens can act as a useful tool for teachers and researchers to ensure that we focus on the actual people in the language classroom and the relationships that take place in real learning contexts. This event was kindly supported by Multilingual Matters and the TEFLology Podcast.
It has been a long time since I wrote about authenticity… or at least it feels like it anyway. In truth I have a few chapters which aren’t even published yet which discuss this favourite theme of mine, but because I was on sabbatical last year (if you can call it that) and because I basically didn’t really do much work last year except here and there, it feels like many moons have passed since I mused and reflected on the concept of authenticity from the perspective of language teaching.
Yesterday I was out walking my beloved dog, Pippin, and listening to some Nirvana. There was a line in the song that said “That’s old news” and this got me to thinking. Old news is an interesting expression, it’s something of an oxymoron. News, by definition, has to be new. So old news can’t really be news. I instantly started thinking about the lessons I teach which incorporate elements from the news or current affairs. Now that I’m back to teaching after a year off, it’s interesting how much I realised I enjoy thinking about my classes and planning materials for them.
The first big change in the news to have happened since I was last in the classroom in the academic year of 2019 is obviously the timely end of Trump’s presidency. Nobody was more relieved than me to be rid of this toxic, bloated, deranged orange billionaire. But, there is now a Trump shaped hole in many of my lessons. I used to teach a class on the discourse of racism, in which we take Teun van Dijk’s ( 2008) work on disclaimers and denial in the discourse of racism, and utilise some of the principles to analyse articles and speeches.
In the class, the example I have been doing for the past four years was Trump’s famous presidential announcement speech, June 16, 2015, in which he spouted vitriolic nonsense about Mexicans being “rapists”. I am including the handout I use as well for anyone interested.
I am going to talk about this lesson in terms of authenticity and currency. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, currency is one of Feda Mishan’s 3Cs of Authenticity (along with culture, and challenge (2005: 44–64)) from her brilliant book Designing authenticity into language learning materials. I have always found the concept of currency to be particularly helpful when I think about materials and authenticity. Basically, currency refers to the temporal dimension to authenticity, which she particularly elaborates with respect to the changing nature of language use, although she does also associate it with topical issues and current affairs. In my own writings I have already slightly developed on this idea, when I wrote;
“If I do a lesson about John Lennon in December, it would have more currency than doing the lesson in, for example May, because I could use the opportunity to mark the anniversary of his death. I could also ask students to talk about their own favourite musicians, and the dangers and stresses that fame brings. Currency not only refers to the ‘up-to-date-ness’ of the materials but also their topicality and relevance.”
(Pinner, 2016: 79)
With the departure of Trump, I thought this might be a good time to discuss “old news” and currency in relation to authenticity. I think this lesson is perhaps one of the best I had in terms of helping the students understand and apply Van Dijk’s framework for identifying racist discourse. It was always fun to teach, and the students enjoyed putting Trump under the microscope and coming to the unwavering conclusion that Trump was indeed being racist in his speech. The lesson had a video, it had an academic text behind it, and most of all it had currency.
This year, I can probably still get away with using this lesson, but what about next year? And the year after? Clearly, with Trump no longer current (as in serving as president and regularly featuring in news and media) this lesson is going to start aging quickly. In other words, I need to find a new, more contemporary racist figure to analyse.
But, currency is not simply a matter of updating your handouts now and then. This could quickly become exhausting. Whilst I am very happy with the idea of The Living Textbook (meaning we are always updating the materials we wrote for class), it would be nice to be able to create materials which can be used for more than a few years.
Materials and “Old News”
When a teacher creates a lesson based around a newspaper article, they do so knowing that they will very likely only be able to use those materials once, or at best a handful of times. Why? Because the news will soon lose its currency, and thus an aspect of its intrinsic authenticity will also be lost. Students are not going to get excited by a random newspaper article that you had lying around for years. They need “New News” in order to connect with the topic, find relevance in it in the world, validify and authenticate it. This is a shame, as I am sure anyone who has made a lesson plan from a newspaper knows that it can be quite time-consuming. I’ve always found that using newspaper articles in my classes was a good way of getting students involved in something going on in the world and brining it into our class. And, of course, newspapers are part and parcel of the “classic” definition of authenticity. Please note, I am NOT saying newspapers are authentic in and of themselves. They are not. But, I think we can all agree that it’s a bit of a shame to design classes around a news story and not to be able to get some kind of mileage out of it.
However, let’s consider a slightly different perspective. What if the newspaper article was from August 6, 1945?
Despite being over 70 years old, this article retains its currency simply because of the historical importance of the event.
Another example might be a paper from September 11th, 2001.
Such articles will likely always retain their authentic currency, simply because these stories are not news but history.
Does this mean I can keep using my Donald Trump lesson then? Can I say that this was a historical speech?
The issue is a little more complex than that. I think Trump’s presidency is very likely going to be remembered in history (hopefully for the right reasons). However, I personally might feel that Trump was old news still rather than being history, simply because we need more time to pass before we can gauge how history responds to the event, how people reflect on it, and importantly how much people care about it! This is especially true in terms of the demographic I teach. I need to consider how 20-year-old Japanese university students feel about Trump and whether they still care, now or in a few years’ time. My feeling is that for my students, they wouldn’t be very interested in analysing Trump anymore now that he’s no longer president.
This is why currency is such an interesting concept, and does not simply equate with how recent something is. I would argue that, keeping with the US president theme, Abraham Lincoln has more currency than, say, George W. Bush. I feel that students would appreciate a lesson on JFK more than they would on The Donald, and this is because of currency. Lincoln and JFK belong to history, whereas Bush and Trump are simply in the past.
Currency Vs History
The problem with this conceptualisation of authentic currency is that it might discourage teachers and materials writers from using stories from recent current affairs because of the way they will age quickly. We are already very aware of how international textbooks are constantly needing to be updated. Photos of students in the 90s just won’t cut it for a coursebook anymore. Photos, typography and graphic styles are all easy identifiers of the age of a textbook, and publishers are certainly under the impression that their customers will not want to spend good money on an ancient textbook. Opening a textbook and seeing a photo of someone using a chunky laptop or sitting in front of one of the big CRT monitors instead of a flatscreen is likely to inspire a snort of derision, not a good starting point when the teacher is trying to get their students to invest in the content. Not only do styles and fashions change but also so does language. The fact that materials need updating is as inevitable as the fact that languages themselves are constantly evolving and updating.
So, should materials writers simply avoid anything from current affairs? Should textbooks be filled with articles on the moon landing and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.? (I chose both those examples as they are widely used in textbooks). I think it would be a shame if we let currency slide in favour of history, but it’s true that something historical will retain its currency for longer than something which is merely ‘news’. The balance is in the sweet spot somewhere in-between. There are new news articles all the time, but certain topics retain their currency and recur in the news regularly. Issues about gender equality, racial discrimination, the environment, social justice. Critical topics such as these will always have currency and it will not be hard to find news stories to link to these issues.
I have also experienced a kind of “noticing” effect when teaching about certain topics, much as Richard Schmidt started noticing new vocabulary items everywhere once he had learned it. When I am talking about a certain topic with one of my classes, it’s never long before a newspaper article with direct relevance to that topic jumps out at me. Recently it was the resignation of Olympics Committee President Mori for making sexist remarks, which fits very nicely in with my class on feminism and gender issues. The lesson is there already, but this provides an up-to-date reference point. I might show a slide of Mori in the class, but it’s easy to change and update.
Unfortunately, the Trump lesson isn’t going to be so easy to update. That lesson has lost its authentic currency I fear, so I will need to redesign it. But as I’m doing so, I will bear in mind these reflections on currency and try to get something which has a good mileage. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
References
Mishan, F. (2005). Designing authenticity into language learning materials. Bristol: Intellect Books.
Pinner, R. S. (2016). Reconceptualising authenticity for English as a global language. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Schmidt, R. W. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 129-158.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and power. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
In this 90-minute Webinar, participants will be able to join in a discussion about how complexity perspectives to language learning can be researched with a focus on making sense of complex and unpredictable phenomena. We are planning to include a lot of audience participation so we will be fielding and answering questions. We will also encourage audience members to ‘take the mic’ and share their own experiences too.
We will discuss how the Complexity Lens can act as a useful tool for teachers and researchers to ensure that we focus on the actual people in the language classroom and the relationships that take place in real learning contexts.
