AI Lesson Design?
A.I. is presumptuous when it comes to lesson design, because it facilitates a ‘top to bottom’ approach and that makes its content and method biased towards learners’ personalized needs in language learning.
With the ‘communicative approach’ that out-broke in the late 60’s, the foreign language course books took over the language course lesson design, with lesson plans up to 10-12 units. These lesson plans, delivered topics and exercises that provided input for teachers to teach with and for students to learn from. Classrooms were buzzing with energy. However, almost a year after, this method was considered unsuccessful.
Could it be because it had completely avoided teaching grammar and structure within cultural contexts? The language teacher in the classroom had turned into a moderator, and books had taken over the language teaching. Much like what is happening today with the use of A.I. lesson design for foreign language teaching.
Like the communicative method, the A.I. lesson design assumes that “grammar and structure will take care of itself” and the learner needs no deeper learning in this area. Moreover, the A.I. lesson design derives itself from “the perfect speaker” coined by Chomsky. Much like the early works of Chomsky back then, the A.I. regards all learners are one and the same, and that they all have shared challenges in learning languages. In international contexts and classrooms, this cannot be further from the truth.
The Perfect Speaker
The perfect speaker, who in essence is the speaker in a homogeneous society, having the same challenges linguistically as anyone else around him or her is not a reality. Neither is the A.I. assumption of it. Because such a speaker does not exist, and the grammar and structure teaching within contexts does not take care of itself, these assumptions do not help any language learner to succeed.
The lesson plans to help course participants learn and practice language skills can only be successful, if they are tailor made to serve the needs of the specific learners. Thinking that there is just one type of learner at each level of proficiency is a fallacy.
