What's Next? Embracing the Changes in EAL

Language learning has always been fundamentally human, built on trust, relationship, and the irreplaceable experience of being understood. The rise of AI in language education doesn't change that truth, but it does challenge us to defend it. This keynote moves beyond the hype to ask what these technologies can and cannot do for the learners we serve.

Three honest tensions shape the conversation: keeping pedagogy ahead of technology, recognizing the equity and access gaps that AI can widen rather than close, and affirming that human connection remains at the heart of language acquisition, not as a soft ideal, but as a research-grounded reality.

But this session is ultimately forward-looking. What's next for EAL professionals isn't a scramble to keep up. It's an opportunity to lead. Teacher agency, relational practice, and deep knowledge of learners are precisely the capacities that matter most right now, and this keynote offers a practical and hopeful framework for carrying them into whatever comes next.

As generative AI (GenAI) becomes embedded in everyday language learning, teaching, assessment, and settlement practices, EAL educators are asked not simply to adopt new tools, but to make consequential judgments about language, equity, and participation. 

This keynote examines what’s next for EAL in Canada by moving beyond questions of efficiency and effectiveness to ask how GenAI reshapes the conditions under which newcomers learn, write, and speak. Drawing on a critical sociomaterial view of human-AI interaction that recognizes how technologies are never neutral, the talk explores how platform designs, datasets, and algorithms, together with GenAI policies and practices necessitate the development of critical digital literacies. 

While GenAI can support translation, feedback, genre awareness, and access to institutional discourses, it can also reproduce standard language ideologies, nativespeakerism, racialized and gendered biases, and material inequalities. 

For EAL professionals serving newcomers, the challenge is therefore not whether to embrace or reject AI, but how to develop pedagogies that provide learners with the tools to use GenAI strategically, ethically, and critically. 

The keynote offers practical principles for designing GenAI-mediated EAL instruction that foregrounds multilingual repertoires, values learner voice, cultivates critical awareness, and supports more equitable participation in rapidly changing educational, workplace, and civic contexts.

Read his recent publication here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annual-review-of-applied-linguistics/article/identity-and-investment-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/AF34D9E593B428F0D4F69FF3C363138A

As Canada continues to evolve through immigration, increasing diversity, and shifting social realities, EAL teachers and professionals are often positioned at the frontlines of relational care, belonging, and community integration. Beyond teaching language, EAL educators frequently become trusted witnesses to the emotional, social, cultural, and systemic challenges experienced by newcomers navigating displacement, isolation, racism, uncertainty, and complex settlement systems. This keynote explores how relational and collaborative approaches can help move newcomer support beyond transactional EAL educational models toward deeper experiences of belonging, dignity, and connection. Drawing from collaborative-dialogic practice, trauma-informed care, and community mental health research, this presentation will examine the intersections between migration, mental health, language learning, and social inclusion. Participants will be invited to reflect on how educational and settlement spaces can foster relational safety, hope, and collective wellbeing while responding ethically and compassionately to the realities newcomers and the teachers who support them increasingly face across Canada.

As someone who has been teaching writing to EAL students for almost 15 years, I am constantly thinking about what it means to teach and assess writing. I am also continuously revising old and adapting new strategies to help EAL students become independent writers in a language that is not their first. However, rather than focusing on challenges that another language presents, I focus on helping students draw strengths from being an EAL writer. 

 In this presentation and workshop, I will talk about several strategies I use in my Writing Studies (WRS) classes at the University of Alberta to show how principles from the disciplines of writing studies and composition studies can help students write more effectively and with greater ease and confidence. My presentation will highlight EAL writers’ linguistic resources and will examine how WRS can foster rhetorical awareness, genre knowledge, critical engagement with sources and social engagement with other EAL writers. I will briefly address AI in EAL writing and offer some thoughts on how it can be ethically and effectively utilized. 

In the workshop part of my presentation, I will invite participants to reflect on how principles of WRS and EAL pedagogy can complement one another to support student agency and student writing processes. I will end the presentation with a few practical strategies that instructors will be able to adapt across disciplines.