Jonathon Reinhardt (PhD, Penn State) is Professor of English Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona, USA. His scholarly interests are in the theory and practice of technology-enhanced second and foreign language pedagogy, especially with emergent, informal technologies like social media and digital gaming. With over 50 publications and talks in over a dozen countries around the world, he is the author of "Gameful Second and Foreign Language Teaching and Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice" (2019) and, most recently, served as the game-based language learning section editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of CALL (2025).
Plenary Presentation Title: Formal Language Education in the Age of AI and the Digital Wilds: What Do We Do Now?
Abstract:
Formal language educators are caught in a bind. On one hand, institutions increasingly emphasize assessment, standards, and certification to assert legitimacy and control over language learning. On the other, ubiquitous AI-enhanced informal resources in the digital wilds now allow individuals to pursue highly personal language learning goals beyond institutions. These goals are often humanistic and self-actualizing—driven by play, exploration, affiliation, and socialization—activities that resist assessment and credentialization.
In an era when AI can translate, correct, and even simulate conversation, and when digital media can connect anyone with the most engaging teachers in the world, the purpose of formal language education cannot merely be to train learners to use technology. Rather, it must be to cultivate the self-reflective, intercultural, and aesthetic capacities that make human multilingualism worth pursuing. As machine translation becomes increasingly efficient, the pragmatic impetus to learn another language may fade, leaving emotional, relational, and identity-based motives as the most compelling reasons to learn languages.
To frame this challenge, I contrast humanistic and credentialist understandings of language education and outline theoretical and pedagogical frameworks aligned with a technology-enhanced humanistic perspective—drawing on theories of self-regulation (Henry & Liu, 2023), learner autonomy (Teng, 2019), and motivation (Dörnyei, 2020; Ushioda, 2020), as well as relational/humanistic pedagogies (Kern, 2024; Amini et al., 2025; Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008). I argue that the key to language education’s relevance is teaching learners to use technology not simply to acquire an L2, but to cultivate and transform their own humanity in the process.
Workshop Title: Using AI to develop gameful language learning experiences
Abstract:
Game-based language learning is touted as an effective approach to learning (Reinhardt, 2019), but appropriate games are difficult to find, they may be hard to learn to play, and they may not be easily matched to specific learning goals. With the advent of AI, however, teachers can learn to make their own games--analog, digital, or hybrid-- for a particular learning objective, matched with curricular content, and adapted for individual, group, or class play.
Three types of custom games are of interest. First, social deduction games have students role-play different characters in an unfolding mystery that is solved by class detectives. Next, escape games have students 'escape' a dire situation by solving a string of interconnected puzzles. Finally, interactive fiction games have students 'read' the game, following branching storylines to make narrative choices that result in different endings. All three types of games require the players to use language meaningfully, both as an object of analysis in the game and as a medium of player communication. Games are relatively easy to brainstorm and develop using AI if certain guidelines and design formula are followed, appropriate prompts are used, and output is carefully edited.
In the workshop, participants will be introduced to game-based language learning and teaching and the benefits of designing custom games using AI. Examples of all three game types will be shared for learning English and other languages, and guidelines will be provided on how to create, pedagogically frame, and implement them. We'll also discuss how students might be involved in their creation and implementation, and how they might be used in a research project.