Background
The resources housed here were created to address an important need: to provide high quality, research-based instructional materials that critically and meaningfully approach AI language technologies in the language classroom. Check out more information on what guides the project here.
Resources at a Glance
The BLC offers a suite of resources for language instructors. The current set of materials focus on machine translation tools. However, digital tools don’t exist in isolation and, in fact, to use them critically requires multiple tools to triangulate outputs and verify understanding. Therefore, the materials also include other tools, such as online dictionaries and genAI chatbot tools (e.g., ChatGPT).
Activity Templates
A set of activity templates that can be adapted to fit any language. The activities are organized by level (all levels/foundational, beginning, intermediate, and advanced) around three different broad categories: Tool Functionality, Tool Use, and Tool Ethicality.
Instructional Modules
A portion of the activity templates have been fully adapted into instructional modules for certain languages (Arabic, Dutch, German, Filipino, French, Hindi, Italian, Mandarin Chinese). Coming FA2025.
Additional Resources
A set of additional resources have been created that provide language instructors with additional support on AI language tools:
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How Does It Work? A Guide to Machine Translation for Language Instructors: A non-technical summary of how machine translation and related tools work.
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Annotated Bibliography: A summary of key publications on machine translation.
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Recorded Presentations: A series of recorded presentations on MT and language learning.