Symposium "AI Applications in Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages and in Academic Writing"

The symposium "AI Applications in Teaching and Learning Foreign Languages and in Academic Writing" took place at the Ruhr University of Bochum on June 2. Sophie Forkel from the French Department attended. Here are her thoughts on the interesting symposium lectures and workshops:

In his talk "How Neural Networks, Neural Machine Translation and ChatGPT Work," Prof. Dr. Josef van Genabith from Saarland University shared exciting insights into how the new AI developments function. Jun.-Prof. Dr. Carolyn Blume (TU Dortmund) shed light on which tools can play a role in the writing process.

The discussions and workshops centered on two questions: "What do students still need to learn?" "How should exams be designed to fit these changing circumstances?"

The prevailing opinion was that it is neither realistic nor sensible to generally ban the new tools. Moreover, recent data has shown that language instructors are actively following developments in AI. According to surveys, instructors are better informed than students about the new possibilities associated with AI.

An important conclusion from the symposium was that a major focus in language instruction  will be strengthening the students’ competence to assess AI output. In addition to the traditional learning objectives, this is becoming an increasingly important skill.
 

Contact: Sophie Forkel

Published on July 31, 2023