Language Instruction

The Learning Lab runs hands-on AI workshops for language instructors: sessions for a single department, and sessions with the Language Center that are open to instructors from language programs across Harvard. One sequence, led by Madeleine Woods and Jungyoon Koh, was shaped with instructors in Romance Languages and Literatures through preparatory conversations and built on sample lessons contributed by RLL faculty across multiple languages and levels of instruction. Instructors learned to generate dialogues and reading passages keyed to a given week's vocabulary, to develop new exercises and comprehension questions, to surface patterns in student errors for individual students and for whole sections, and to test how well AI voice models handle their particular language, since quality varies sharply across languages. In small groups, instructors then applied the tools to lessons from their own languages and levels, and the session closed with discussion of the affordances, limits, and ethics of AI in language teaching. Throughout, the aim was culturally relevant, level-appropriate materials matched to what a specific class needs, grounded in the instructor's own pedagogical judgment, at a fraction of the preparation time.

To arrange an AI training for your language program or department, contact the Bok Center.

Students in Modern Hebrew BB built their own AI-powered practice tools, such as interactive flashcards and vocabulary drills populated with their own course materials, in a workshop Hebrew instructor Romy Neumark designed with the Learning Lab. Students worked from a short reading list on how people learn languages, covering spaced repetition, comprehensible input, and deliberate practice, and designed tools grounded in that research and aimed at what each of them needed to practice. Students already use AI to study; a workshop like this teaches them to do it in ways that follow the evidence on how language learning works.

To run a workshop where your students build study tools grounded in learning research, contact the Bok Center.

After attending the Bok Center's summer workshop series on Claude for teaching, course development, and research, Claire-Marie Brisson, Preceptor in French, built Le Sillage in Claude Code: a bilingual website where her French 64 students read, transcribe, and map the written record of French North America. That record is scattered across dozens of libraries, and locating it can take most of a semester, so students in a language course rarely get to work with it. Le Sillage puts the documents in one place: images of manuscripts, early printed books, and maps called up live from the libraries that hold them, with citations attached automatically when a transcribed passage goes into an essay. The scholarly work stays with the students. They read the pages in the French in which they were written, transcribe them, decide which places and people to tag on the course's shared map, and write their essays on the site alongside their sources and notes. Le Sillage grew out of research Brisson has pursued since her dissertation; the workshop series gave her the means to turn years of her own scholarship into a place where students can work with it.

To learn to build tools for your own course, contact the Bok Center.