Speaking at the 2026 Global English Education China Assembly, held from Friday to Sunday at Beijing Foreign Studies University in Beijing, leading English language educators stressed that in the age of artificial intelligence, foreign language education must pivot from rote memorization and mechanical grammar exercises toward cultivating critical thinking, cultural empathy and self-directed learning.
Additionally, they said students should engage in genuine dialogue with texts, critically evaluate AI-generated content and take ownership of their own learning.
Chen Zehang, a professor at Beijing Normal University’s School of Foreign Languages and Literature, said the fundamental value of reading lies in genuine dialogue with a text — questioning, challenging, imagining and empathizing.
“AI can help students understand what a text says, but it cannot help them experience the real meaning of reading,” she said. “We are not spending time on reading to memorize words or translate sentences. We are reading to build minds that can question, infer and connect — and that is exactly what AI cannot do.”
As AI increasingly handles grammar and other surface-level language tasks, teachers’ roles must also evolve, Chen said. Rather than serving primarily as language instructors, teachers should become designers of thinking experiences and facilitators of transferable reading strategies.
For example, instead of asking students to identify grammatical mistakes in AI-generated content, teachers can encourage them to evaluate its accuracy, fairness and appropriateness, she said.
“Teachers are irreplaceable guides to meaning, judgment and curiosity,” Chen added.
Yang Luxin, dean of Beijing Foreign Studies University’s School of English and International Studies, said AI can also support learning when designed with clear educational objectives.
She has been piloting task-specific AI agents in writing classes, allowing students to receive personalized, text-specific feedback while drafting and continue revising over multiple rounds of interaction.
“The advantage is not that the AI has better professional judgment than the teacher,” Yang said. “It is that every student can receive individualized feedback while still drafting.”
“In a class of 19 to 27 students, I could not sustain that kind of immediate dialogue with everyone at once,” she added.
To prevent students from simply copying AI-generated answers, Yang’s team designed the agents with explicit pedagogical limits. They are instructed to diagnose problems before offering corrections, focus only on the current learning objective and ask guiding questions rather than rewrite an entire passage.
Students are required to complete their first draft independently before consulting the AI, decide for themselves what revisions to make and submit a record explaining how they used the AI during the writing process.
Student feedback has been generally positive, with many reporting reduced writing anxiety, greater confidence and stronger motivation.
“We present the AI not as a ‘robot teacher’ replacing the human teacher, but as a patient writing partner available during drafting and after class,” Yang said. “The teacher remains the designer and final professional authority.”
Cheng Liying, dean of the School of Education at City University of Macau, said learning a foreign language opens a window — or a door — to understanding different ways of seeing the world.
“The most important thing is that humans are curious and should not sit at the bottom of a well,” she said, referring to the Chinese idiom describing people with a narrow outlook.
Cheng said her school’s educational philosophy places nurturing at its core.
“We require our postgraduate students to respect others, take responsibility and show resilience,” she said. While AI can be a helpful learning companion and mentor, she stressed that it “cannot care for you”.
Addressing concerns that memorization and grammar instruction may become obsolete in the AI era, Cheng said mastering the fundamentals remains indispensable.
“If people do not understand basic concepts, they cannot recognize or process information beyond that level,” she said. “Having AI does not mean we stop learning basics. The fundamentals still need to be learned; AI can just help us learn them faster.”
China Daily
