#46 - AI In The World Language Classroom: Rethinking the Dynamic When A Bot Can Write Spanish in Seconds

What happens when a tool can write a passable Spanish 1 paragraph in six seconds? We took that provocation and built a practical roadmap for world language teachers who want less busywork and more human connection. From accent cleanup to comprehension‑friendly formatting, we walk through concrete AI prompts that shorten prep without flattening your voice. Then we go deeper into the CI engine: generating level‑right PQA and picture talk questions anchored to performance indicators, so you enter class with a rich menu instead of a blank page—and keep your energy for the live work only you can do.

We also tackle the elephant in the staff room: cheating and assessment. If a bot can complete a take‑home essay, it’s not measuring growth. So we pivot to tasks AI struggles to mimic—live interpersonal checks, one‑take audio and video, annotated readings with visible thinking, and experiential homework that sends students into the world to notice language and report back. Along the way, we share differentiation prompts that surface fast, scaffold slow, and require zero extra copies, all tied to clear can‑do statements. The goal is simple: spend more minutes on communication and less on clerical churn.

Underneath the tactics is a human reminder. Errors are not defects; they’re the gold seams that show where growth happens. AI won’t kill language. It will kill busywork and force us to design work that matters. We close with ethics and responsibility—citing assistance, watching environmental impact, and setting norms students can carry into college and careers. If you’re ready to keep your class target‑language rich, joyful, and sustainable, press play, steal the prompts, and tell us what you’ll hand to AI this week.

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Transcript

Why Teachers Hesitate On New Tech

Internet Memory Lane & Trusting Sources

AI As Time‑Saving Assistant

Editing, Accents, And Formatting With AI

Leveling Texts And Guardrails

Generating Comprehensible Questions

Differentiation Made Practical

Ethics, Cheating, And Assessment Shifts

Do More Of What Only Humans Can Do

Celebrating Errors And Connection

Design Work Students Can’t Outsource

SPEAKER_00 0:53

What's up? Kellokay and salute world language teachers. Welcome to the Practical Proficiency Podcast, where we make the transition to proficiency-oriented instruction in your world language class. In a way that works for you, your unique context and teaching style, and doesn't sacrifice your well-being along the way. I'm your host, Devin Gunning, the teacher, author, conference host, curriculum creator, and consultant behind La Libre Language Learning. This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you, who's ready to dodge the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition-driven instruction and CI overnight. You're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy instead of adding too late with practical, authentic, and down-to-earth strategies that don't require reinventing the wheel or more training. We'll work together towards the magic of a community-based, target language-rich classroom rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input. Let's go. Let's talk about it. Hey, welcome to the Practical Proficiency Podcast. I'm excited to talk to you today about some of the most important questions that we're asking right now in the age of AI. Today, let's dive into some AI prompts that work for the practical, comprehensible, input-based classroom. Now, right now with AI, we as teachers can sometimes be, even though we are supposed to be helping students understand and experience the world around them with a critical eye, teachers are a bit notorious for being reluctant to accept new tools because it, of course, is something that as teachers, we really do want to preserve human expression, human connection, and human communication, especially as language teachers, above all else. But if I could rewind the clock for you for a minute, I'm gonna take you back down memory lane and think about what happened when other similar things started to become part of the classroom. So wind back time with me for a little bit and come hang out with me in my fourth grade classroom. When I was a kid going to Catholic school outside of a Philadelphia suburb, I had a computer class and a typing class. And I remember vividly being in fourth grade around like how old am I? I don't know. Um, I'm in my 30s. So the this fourth grade experience happened like somewhere between like 2002 or 2004 or five. So like the internet being widely used and available in an education setting was still something that I remember feeling that my teachers were a little bit uncomfortable with. I remember vividly going to library as my special area that week, and we had a whole class about, hey guys, so there's these crazy things called online encyclopedias. Like this was a, you know, 20 years ago, we still had a lot of physical copies of encyclopedias in libraries, which of course are like completely out of date now because when you have something like the internet that constantly refreshes information, why would you want an encapsulated anthological piece of information printed on paper? It doesn't really make sense. Like it was quite laborious to reprint new sets of encyclopedias every year. And the internet made that obsolete, right? But it I remember my library teacher still telling me, you can't trust everything that you read on the internet because anybody can write anything. And so we went into this very important lesson for her about making sure that you're citing your sources whenever you find something online, especially with encyclopedias. For some reason, she was real upset about the encyclopedias. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, anybody can write anything? That's pretty crazy. But at the same time, I was also wondering, like, well, why is she so worried about that? Anyone can write anything. That's pretty cool. That means that I don't always have to go to a book to get the information that I want, which at the time was, of course, like, what ridiculous ways can I paint my poly pockets? Like, I want ideas for that. And of course, that's what we use the internet for a lot, right? We use it for a lot of junk content. So think about fourth grade Devin being excited about the possibilities of the internet. AI is a lot like that right now. Your students, in whatever grade they are in, are experiencing a world where AI is part of their lives. My kid is in fourth grade and he knows very well what AI is and uses it sometimes and sees a lot of the content and he's not even phased by it. He doesn't even think it's weird. It's just part of his world, right? He also, you know, has watched Iron Man. So he's seen that whole Tony Stark idea of having a screen that just pops up and talks to you and gives you information. That's not a new idea for students. So if we look at this whole AI concept from a student's perspective, this is a reality of their world now, a really exciting one. But the idea that you can have some early rudimentary elements of AI that can, you know, write a whole book with the press of a button, that's a little scary for some of the adults in the room, as it should be, because AI, like all tools that humans have, needs to be used responsibly. But I'm here to tell you that AI can be your very best workhorse assistant that can eliminate a lot of your prep and really decrease the energy drain from a classroom that is as high demand as a comprehensible classroom and a proficiency-based classroom can be. Here's why. A proficiency-based classroom that runs off of communication and conversation relies on spontaneous questions and really well-written, comprehensible, understandable questions that are appropriate for a student's level. That can be hard to constantly come up with new information about that. Plus, it's a very energy-draining task to constantly be in some sort of conversation mode with your students. Now, think about teaching. You know as well as I do, there's a lot of grunt work in this profession. There is a lot of manual grading, creating rubrics, editing things, writing things, um, drafting emails, all that stuff. That's what AI is for. AI can really help take away a lot of the busy work that we're currently doing in this profession and can also, is it controversial for me to say this as a TPT author? Probably, but it can also eliminate a lot of the resources that you may be relying on other people to make for you that you can make very simply yourself if you're really in a pinch and you need to, so that you can save your money for the ex for the really creative, um, really useful like full week units and things that you can't create on your own that have all those really helpful visuals and tons of great projects, you know, all that stuff. Like you no longer need to use um your planning time or if you buy those lessons, you don't need to use AI for you don't need to use that anymore. You can use AI for a lot of those things, which is, I think, a healthy thing in this profession because then, you know, if you're a curriculum creator or a resource creator, you're no longer making things that, you know, you can easily replicate yourself. Like it forces us to make sure that what we're doing is really top-notch, right? So it's good for everybody. So we're in this phase right now of thinking about how AI will change the classroom. Is it destroying human expression? All of that. What it's really destroying is your ability to tell whether the project that your student did at home is actually theirs or they used an AI text generator to make it. That's a big problem. So let's talk about how we can work with this. We'll get into that. Let's first jump into how AI can be your really helpful classroom assistant. Now, I used to work in a school where teacher cadets would volunteer in teachers' classrooms and would do a lot of this grunt work for them that really sucks up a lot of our planning period, right? They would take attendance during class. They would cut up test cards, they would make copies, they would go run down to the office and pick up your lamination for you, they would empty your little paper inbox, that kind of stuff. That allowed you the space and the breathing room to be able to do the job that nobody else can do, to manage and preserve the relationships in your classroom, to work with behavior, to look at the task cards that your student intern just cut up for you and make sure that your student understands that you care about them when you are explaining how to do the activity and you're making sure the directions are on their level. That's work that only you as the teacher in the classroom can do. Here is what I use AI to do as my administrative assistant in a classroom environment and as a resource creator. Number one, accents, baby. If you teach a language with accents, I no longer bother to do all the stupid little keyboard tricks that I've had plestered to my post-its forever on computers in order to make Spanish and French accents happen. I just write what I want to write, write the text that I want to, I don't care about the spelling mistakes, and then I pop that whole thing into a translate, into the AI translator, and I say, oh my gosh, please correct all of the accents and things. Can I tell you how many hours of work that this has saved me from something that is such a waste of time? Now I no longer need to go back and be like, oh no, I forgot an accent. It saves me so much time. And it should for you too, because you, as a French or Spanish, or Japanese, Chinese, Russian teacher, whatever, you're probably spending a lot of time like going back and checking your work for accents or um, you know, special tiles and things like that. You no longer have to do that. It's great. Write the text with your human, beautiful expression, and then you pop it into the translator to refine it for you. I also do sometimes use AI as a rudimentary editor. So I use it a lot for formatting a text. So if I'm writing a text for a Spanish one reader and it's a story for Spanish one, I will write it, of course, with my own human voice, and then I'll pop it into an AI so that they can format it for me. And I say, hey, can you add bullets to this? Can you summarize the second paragraph and rephrase it in a new way so that they get extra repetitions? Can you also add some underlying points to this where it matters? And it does all of that text formatting for me so that I don't need to spend the extra 20 minutes to do that, and it does it way better than I would. It's a really good use of your time if you are trying to, let's say, if you've got some curriculums will give you like a copied version of their stories that they use in something like a PDF or a Google Doc, but they're very long stories and your students are gonna have trouble with them. Pop it into a text translator and ask it to format it for a level one reader. Say, hey, can you add spaces? Hey, can you make this just a tiny bit shorter? Or can you um add some specific translations for these specific words? Like all of the normal editing things that you would do, you can make a lot of texts a little more friendly for your level or your class by using an AI editor style to help reformat it for you. Um, those, of course, should for obvious legal reasons, make sure it just stays in your classroom, whatever you're doing with it. And the other thing that you can do is if you have a level one text, you can use an AI prompter to say, hey, can you add some suggestions for how I might level this for level two? What are some things to add in there? Hey, I'm doing this unit with my level twos. Can you make this reading relevant for my level twos? Very much so. A great way to save yourself a lot of time with edits and adjustments that you probably would have made on your own, right? Now, remember that the AI is a taskmaster and it will never replace a native speaker. So I use it as a first pass, but I always trust my own eye and trust to a native speaker for the nuances and the local slang. That's really, really important with all of this. How else can you use AI? Well, specifically for a comprehensible input-focused teacher, I would say the most powerful thing that you can do with AI is AI can do a lot of the question generation for you. Let's explore this a little bit. A communication and conversation focused class relies on questions. But more importantly, if you're CI focused, it relies on questions your students can understand. That takes a lot of brain work to constantly be thinking on your feet, talking to students, generating conversation, and you're the one who's coming up with all the questions right there on the spot. Talk about draining. When you come back from a class like that, all you want to do is just sink into the couch for four hours after that. Like you lose your whole weekend just recovering from how much brain power you've been doing. If you have a conversation-loaded prep for like four days in a row, like by the time you get to Friday, you're like, screw this, I don't have the brain space to do this anymore. So this is where AI can really be your best friend in a comprehensible input-based class. Have the AI generator create questions for you. These have to be very carefully prompted, but it's really helpful. So make sure that when you're popping this into whichever one you prefer to use, that your AI generator gets this prompt. Hey, generate five comprehension questions for this topic, this conversation, or this text based on the actual 2024 performance indicators for blank students. And I would put in there whatever level. So like novice mid, novice high. Then you're gonna ask it, please use these specific target phrases and repeat them in a comprehensible input style, whatever the activity is. So insert the activity. This way, you are spending zero time writing questions. And then when it comes time for your picture talk, you are doing all of the teacher-focused, heart-focused work of making those questions fun and easy and engaging and understandable for the students. But you no longer have to like spend your prep time thinking of questions. It's a huge energy saver if you're doing a PQA or a circling type activity, is you can ask AI to generate some of these questions for you. You can give it prompts too, like, hey, we are studying the family. Give me 10 funny and dynamic PQA style questions that are conversational and comprehensible for Spanish one students. By the way, I want to make sure that we especially hit this phrase and this phrase and this phrase. The teacher takes this amazing prompt and then jumps into the class and makes sure that that conversation stays dynamic and you've spent zero energy creating the questions, and now your brain has more space to give your class the attention that it needs for that exercise to be successful. It's really great for that. Now, how else can you use AI? One of my favorite ways to do this is that um AI in a CI classroom can be your number one extension tool. So you remember before AI, differentiation was a huge hot topic in education because it was so time consuming and really difficult. Like I would argue it's it was almost impossible to do this in many of the environments that we were teaching in where you had like I was used to having like 30 plus Spanish one students in a room, and then your administrators asking you to provide differentiation for them, and you're like, are you serious? Like I'm barely keeping up with this workload as it is. Oh, wait, I'm not keeping up with this workload. So the whole idea of differentiation was like you'd have to think of an activity on the spot when somebody finished early, or when you could tell that the questions weren't at their level, or when they were obviously bored, or you know, like you had so many different things, so many dynamic aspects of your classroom. We actually have a lot of science and research about differentiation that an AI crawler can access instantly and give you much better ideas than you would have come up with with your teacher-tired brain during your prep area. So I would argue that with AI, differentiation is way more possible than it used to be. Now, again, nobody is ever going to replace the role of a teacher in differentiation. But the workload that differentiation used to require from us with prepping things for it, coming up with ideas, like AI can do a lot of that for you. Here's how I use AI to add a differentiation to all of my TPT products now. And I recommend that you do it too. So I prompt, after I've made a really awesome product or a really awesome reading, I plug it into the AI generator and I tell the AI prompter, hey, here's the can-do statement for this activity. Here's the the classroom that this is going to be used with, here's the age group of the students, here are some important dynamics to consider with students. I have people reading at different levels. I have people with IEPs, I have this, I have that, I have this, I have that. Please give me three suggestions for differentiation. One for students who are struggling, one for students who need some visual scaffolding, two for students who are ready for a challenge, and then three extension activities that are based off of this but require no copies. The result? The AI generator is gonna pop out an act, a bunch of activity ideas for you. Half of them are not gonna be good, and the other half are gonna be amazing, and you wish you thought of them yourself. So I'm doing this now for all of my products, and they're like very clearly AI generated on there. Like it's a Google Doc with like, hey, these are extension activities. A lot of those I use AI to help me generate because it's such a huge idea bank and time saver for teachers to have. And you can use this in your classroom too. Now, with that in mind, let's talk a little bit more about like the human value reality check of this. Like, we need to, with something like this, something that's this powerful, we need to have some ethics involved and we need to have some AI proofing. So here are some things that we really need to consider with an AI classroom, is that this really is the end of out-of-class writing assignments. I mean, if you have an idea for how you can assign a writing assignment and ensure that your students have not used a generator in order to do it, be my guest. However, in the world where an AI generator can write a two-paragraph essay in Spanish for you with the specific prompting of make it sound like I'm in Spanish one in six seconds, then that means that we have to adapt. Assigning out-of-class writing pieces of any kind is a waste of time now, in my opinion, when you have an AI generated world. And it really rings hollow for your students when you're assigning things like this because they know that a task that an AI generator can do is not really worth their time. It's a lot like if I can compare it. When I was uh growing up in the high school environment with calculus and math class and stuff like that, phone calculators were just starting to appear on the scene. And we were living in a time where we were spending a lot of time in class still, which I'm still really mad about and I still think was a huge waste of time, was we would spend a lot of time calculating, a lot of time figuring out how to do like hand multiplication. I'm sorry if you're a math teacher and you think that this is worth your time. But uh, the math teachers that I've done conferences with and have talked about this topic extensively, many of them are also shifting and disagreeing on like we should not be spending time in class making our students calculators, like when they have that in their pocket. We should be thinking about how we can use logic and principles of problem solving and calculative, you know, theories and ideas. I'm not a math teacher, you can obviously tell. Um I'm so a little salty about my 16-year-old calculus grade. So we're in the same environment now where it's really important for language teachers to realize that there's a calculator on the scene now. There is something that can literally generate French and Spanish text at the touch of a button for your students. So why? Ask yourself, why is it important to you that your students spend time in your class doing what an AI text generator can do? Why? Why is it important to you? Can you justify that time for them? And think about the fact that, too, like there have been some far-reaching implications of AI in a world language classroom where if you're spending a lot of time doing something that a translator can do or that a text generator can replicate for a student, then we should start examining with a critical eye how much of this is going to get students to the goal that we all have in mind right now, which is we want to move students up a proficiency level. That's the whole goal of class. We want students to connect better with their fellow humans across the globe, no matter what language they speak and no matter what culture they belong to. So what can we be doing in class that better serves that goal instead of using that time to like, if we're going to follow the math analogy, to be like human calculators? Like, would you rather your students maybe have more of a critical global eye, a more critical perspective, especially around like rhetoric that can come and go, that can be especially anti-cultural and especially anti-diversity? Do we want to spend more time with that? Can you still do that in the target language? The answer is of course. And how much of our time should we be, we should be auditing and thinking about how much of this is a lot like stuff that your kids can use, an AI machine, really, to do that for them? These are the questions that you should be asking. And by the way, this is a fantastic debate to have with your students. If you're in middle school or high school, this is a great thing for us to figure out together. It's more than reasonable to talk to your students about appropriate AI usage, what's considered plagiarism and what's not, and to set our students up for technologically literate and functional, global citizens who are curious about their environment, curious about others, and understand how to appropriately use the tools around them. AI is changing everything, but it doesn't have to change the heart of what our classroom is, which is communication. Which brings me to what I think is some of the most important thing, which is let's do more in class of what only humans can do. There's this exciting thing happening in the 2026 classroom of people are more excited than ever to put away the computer and to learn how to talk to their students and to have back and forth conversations. This is a really exciting thing that I think the push of AI has reminded us of how important the human connection really is. So now that we have these fabulous interns, these fabulous technological tools at our disposal, this is a really important time to show students that humanity is the essential piece of a classroom and what makes being in a classroom with a real breathing teacher so much more valuable and vibrant than like, for example, taking a class online or like learning something from a blog post, or when you meet somebody who speaks Spanish and you just pop your words into a translator, like how much more of a connection you have when you say those words and you make mistakes yourself. Going along those same lines, the presence of AI makes mistakes actually beautiful. Did you know that in Japan, whenever a pot breaks or whenever something gets shattered or damaged, that there's an ancient practice of filling that crack back in with gold? That any time that a piece has been damaged or there's like a nick in a piece of jewelry, in a lot of uh Japanese traditions, it's considered a beautiful piece of that story. It tells of a moment of when something happened to that pottery instead of idolizing perfection, which can often happen in a society where we have a lot of filtering, social media, and all that, all that junk and stuff, is that even though those tools are great, they do push us into some unfortunate habits with expecting perfection all the time. This can be a really great moment for you to highlight how beautiful errors really are in a language. That sometimes when you say something like, oh wow, estoy embarazada, they they see it eso, like I'm embarrassed to say that. When actually the word in like the false cognate for embarrassed in Spanish means pregnant, that's super funny. It's really, really funny. It's not like something that you should be punishing. It's the idea of using errors makes us human, that making errors in our language means that we're progressing and that we're not robots, that we are people and that we're all striving towards a really cool goal together of bettering ourselves and making our brain smarter. And that the stuff that never made our brain smarter, anyways, like writing long pieces of text or you know, translating things, we don't need to do that anymore. We can focus on the most important piece of class, which is communication, talking to each other, reading with each other, learning from each other, and using language to further understand ourselves, the world around us, and the people around us, both who are the same as us and also have differences, and we can look past that and understand that and celebrate those differences. So here's my next step for you is that remember that we went through a a time period in education where we really thought that internet would kill books. That never happened. And AI will not kill language. It just kills a lot of the boring parts of being a teacher and makes it a lot easier for your kids to cheat. So we need to make sure that we're assigning real value assignments to them, real things that cannot be replicated easily by a computer. So if your homework can be done by a bot in six seconds, then maybe it's the assignment and not the bot that's the problem. Honestly, this has always been an issue in world language classrooms. Like if it's something that a translator could easily do for your students, is it worth your time in class? Is it even worth their time outside of class? Let's try something that a bot can't do. Like ask them to watch a Netflix show in another language and write down the words that they didn't understand. Ask them to video themselves while they try to replicate a fun rap from Bad Bunny. Like that would be hilarious. So this is something that I think is going to, of course, be around forever, but let's move with the change instead of fighting it and understand that like this is a really cool age that we're living in, but it's also an age of responsibility, like any new huge tool that we have in AI. I hope that really helps you to be thinking about cool prompts that you can use in your classroom, ways that you can help your students' acquisition, and ways that it can eliminate a lot of gross busy work for you as a teacher, and ways that it is helping me personally as a TPT creator, as a curriculum creator, to make my resources better for you. That I can use this tool to add a lot more to resources a lot quicker and not have to charge you for it. And it's the same thing in your classroom is that you get, you can get a lot more out of an activity with a lot less brain power by using some of these tools responsibly. Oh, and a quick, you know, aside public service announcement, I'm sure that since you're listening to this, you are concerned with how to use AI responsibly. And one of those big things that we should be thinking about is yes, we should continue to monitor and see what is the environmental impact of this. And B, yes, we should be watching for how much AI generated anything there is out there and citing it when appropriate. So this is going to be something that we're all going to need to work out together and figure out. So I'm excited to be on this journey with you to see how AI shifts the classroom dynamic. Right now, I'm seeing that it's moving people more towards valuing true, irreplicable human moments of communication in the classroom while also reducing a lot of your busy work. Even though it's giving us a lot of headache with like what is actually student work and what isn't, this I feel like can help us make a really clear criteria for what's worth your time in class and what's not. So, with that, I'm turning this over to you. What are some ways that you use AI in your classroom? What are some ways that are really saving you a lot of time? And what are some of the headaches that your students are really giving you with AI? Because it's not easy to navigate this new space that we have here. So I'd love to hear about it. Um, send me an email at Devin at Lalibre Language Learning.com. Tell me what are some of the things that AI is doing for you in your class or is not. You can also send us a text in the podcast, which is really cool. And you can submit a question. I'd love to hear what your questions are about using AI to be a better language facilitator. And with that, I'll leave you to go. Use AI to make your prep a lot smoother and a lot faster. And I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for being here. Ciao.