TaiwanCALL 2025 International Conference
Organized by TaiwanCALL Association (formerly as PPTELL), Providence University,
and National Science and Technology Council
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Keynote Speakers
University of California, Berkeley
Rick Kern is Professor of French and Chair of the French Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Previously he served for 16 years as Director of the Berkeley Language Center. He teaches courses in French linguistics, language, and foreign language pedagogy, and supervises graduate teaching assistants. His research interests include language acquisition, literacy, and relationships between language and technology. Professor Kern’s most recent book is Screens and Scenes: Multimodal Communication in Online Intercultural Encounters (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Christine Develotte, and in 2015 he published Language, Literacy, and Technology (Cambridge UP). Earlier books include Literacy and Language Teaching (Oxford UP) and Network-Based Language Teaching (Cambridge UP), co-edited with Mark Warschauer.
Reclaiming Learner/Teacher Agency in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence​
Generative AI has shifted the ground upon which we have based much of our language teaching for centuries. The vitality (even existence) of our language programs may depend on our ability to re-examine and re-articulate our goals for language teaching—some of which can be facilitated by technological tools, others not. In this articulation, it is teachers who must provide the guiding voices, not technologists, not politicians. This talk will present some of the limitations as well as potential benefits of AI for fostering various aspects of language development, stressing attention to the educational values underlying our pedagogical decisions.