This paper highlights two interesting challenges that TESOL faces, the increasing use of automation in communication and the effect of political correctness. With many organizations already embracing the use of AI, TESOL professionals need to prepare their learners for a world where there are also AI detection tools that aim to discern human-created texts from machine-generated ones. In the case of political correctness, greater awareness of discrimination and injustice have repercussions on norms of usage, and this is something that learners cannot afford to be ignorant of. The paper explains how the pedagogical challenges for TESOL that are posed by automation are quite different than those posed by political correctness.
2025-10-10
The future of TESOL must engage critically with the multimodal turn, acknowledging the shifting landscape of communication in a digital age where meaning-making extends beyond linguistic forms to encompass a range of semiotic resources, such as images, gestures, sounds, and spatial designs. This paper argues for a twofold agenda: augmenting English language learning with multimodality and broadening the scope of literacy education to include multimodal literacy. This involves leveraging multimodal resources not merely as supplementary tools but as integral components of language instruction, thereby enriching learners’ communicative competence in authentic and diverse contexts. The paper calls for a strategic and systemic response from the TESOL community, advocating for research-informed pedagogies, policy frameworks that recognize the importance of multimodal literacy, and targeted professional development for teachers.
As with many other disciplines within contemporary Higher Education, the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is now finding itself in a state of considerable flux. Changing attitudes to the role and wider purpose of tertiary education; an ongoing move towards privatization and outsourcing; the recent emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) and global changes to the demographics around international student mobility are just some of the issues continuing to have an impact on EAP’s forward trajectory. Offering a critical evaluation of these and several other factors, this paper speculates on what the coming years might hold for EAP and considers whether the future prognosis for the discipline is most likely to be bright or gloomy.
Creativity is undergoing significant transformation with the growing adoption of AI-powered text generation tools like ChatGPT. Nowadays, teachers are faced with pseudo-creativity scenarios where students can use AI to produce texts of various kinds and present them as if they were their own. To envision the future of creativity in the AI era, it is important to reflect on what creativity was like in the pre-ChatGPT era, what aspects of creativity might be affected in the AI era, and whether AI can compete with humans in demonstrating unprompted playful language use even in a mundane ordinary task. In this paper, I revisited a past pedagogical task employed with students in the pre-ChatGPT era and compared their behaviour with ChatGPT’s performance. The task involves filling in a missing line in partially incomplete texts and reflecting on the process involved. The findings show that although ChatGPT’s responses could mimic students’ responses regarding exploratory creativity, the ability to demonstrate unprompted transformational creativity (a higher form of creativity) is observed only in human responses. Despite producing similar outcomes, the processes underlying students’ responses differ, shaped by their unique personal, socio-cultural and emotional experiences and different thinking styles. While both students and ChatGPT show cognitive fixation at an individual level, students as a group display a variety of thinking styles, reflecting collective diversity. Improper use of AI tools such as ChatGPT can result in collective novelty decay and deprive us of valuable cognitive opportunities to reflect on, draw from, and reshape our personal, emotional and socio-cultural experiences and to engage in unprompted creativity when performing a language task.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has widely affected society, but the full potential impacts on language education are yet to be felt. Most discourse on genAI in language education views it as a facilitator of existing practice, yet genAI has potential for disruptiveness. Based on the theory of disruptive innovation, this paper looks at three case studies of genAI use in education representing different levels of disruptiveness: the sustaining enhancing innovation of combining genAI and flipped classrooms, the sustaining challenging innovation of genAI-aided active learning, and the disruptive innovation of the teacherless classroom. Applying these models to TESOL, a program to increase the likelihood of genAI use in TESOL being beneficial is proposed.
The article will offer an overview of possible future developments relating to English. It will begin by rehearsing the phenomenal expansion of English as a global language, including not only its numerical and geographical expansion but also its penetration of more and more domains of use. It will then examine the trajectories of some ‘world’ languages from the past as possible indicators of the future development of English, and the situation of some major world languages in the present. Next, it will outline how English itself has changed as a language over the past roughly 100 years and speculate on possible pointers for future changes in the light of the continuing tension between standardisation and variation/change. The phenomenal success of English Language Teaching as a global business is rapidly transforming itself under the pressure of technology in particular. The article will suggest possible changes to the way English is taught. Finally, the current status and functions of English as a global language will be reviewed with a view to speculating on how these might change, and possible reasons for this. Forecasts tend to be based on projections from the current situation, yet unforeseen events can have a profound and rapid effect, as was the case with COVID.
This paper outlines the British Council’s Future of English programme from both a historical perspective (the work on the futures thinking in English language teaching since the turn of the millennium) and the British Council’s 2023 publication, The Future of English: Global Perspectives. The three authors of this book give personal perspectives on the changing role of teachers and the teaching of English from their own experiences as first language English speakers, and speculate on how this role has changed and will continue to change.
This article explores the transformative impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on TESOL over the next twenty years, emphasizing both micro-level changes in teaching practices and potential macrolevel shifts in motivations for learning English. It examines how GenAI could reshape employmentdriven motivations for language learning, particularly in industries vulnerable to automation, such as customer service and tourism. At the micro level, the study analyses the implications of GenAI on equity of access and personalisation in TESOL, highlighting opportunities and challenges related to digital divides, cultural bias, and teacher competency. The article also addresses ethical concerns, pedagogical shifts, and the future role of teachers in an increasingly AI-integrated educational landscape. The paper concludes by proposing a research agenda to guide future investigations into the efficacy, risks, and ethical considerations of GenAI in English language teaching.
This article compares the answers to four questions about teacher education ten years hence - who, what, where and how - from, on the one hand, twenty experienced teacher educators and, on the other, three Large Language Models (LLMs). The trainers expected comparatively little change in who their trainees will be over the decade, anticipated greater use of technology (mostly in the development of existing practice, however), emphasised the importance of soft skills training, and made it clear (implicitly) that for them TESOL is a vocation. The LLM answers differed significantly one from another but in general foresaw more innovative uses of technology than the trainers did and predicted an even greater emphasis on soft skills. The article ends with the author’s own view, which is that more will have changed by 2034 than either colleagues or LLMs have predicted – with the latter perhaps intentionally hobbled by their creators.
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