This is not the bold start to 2026 that I might have hoped for on say, January 1, but here I am before the passing of the first month, and I am quite excited about this year in language learning and teaching! Here on TESOL Teacher, last year was the debut, and although I become too busy with teaching and studying for my own test (JLPT N1!), I have already been writing since the year started, just not on here. I have a book project in mind, so I have been working well on that, as it has become clear to me that writing a book, as opposed to journal articles, is my next goal. I was very happy to have published the journal articles that I did, and I learned a great deal from the experience, but I continue with the concern that very few people read the journal articles, they are not freely available to people who do not have access to academic databases–this is a big deal for me, and they take forever to have published. Of course, books must take a while as well, but I feel more free to write what I think and how I think, and I feel much more like an active scholar working on a book, or this website, than I do with journal articles. Perhaps some day I will get back to writing journal articles, but for now, it is this website and my book project(s).
Another thing I will be working on in 2026 is presentations for junior high school and high school English teachers. Last week, I presented to a group of 80 junior high school English teachers about the use of AI for creating materials and other tasks that teachers often do. I found that teachers had quite varied experience using AI (from no experience to active, daily experience), and there were different institutional constraints on how they use it, and a general uncertainly about how it could be useful to them. In the feedback I received, teachers mentioned that one concrete point I made was useful: when creating materials, it is better to teach the AI what you want using exemplars of the material rather than prompt engineering. I have found this consistently myself, and I also heard it mentioned in a recent webinar I attended when Dr. Eric Voss mentioned in relation to feedback on assessments. The art of writing prompts is no doubt important, but if you already have examples of the exact type of material or assessment you are working with, then upload that file–multiple examples when possible–and you are likely to get much better output from the LLM. The other point that teacher feedback mentioned was my point that we should remain stalwart “being the human” in the classroom. I told them about “Superteacher”, the superhero I have been talking about for years and aspiring to be, and how whenever I ask teachers what they think the qualities of Superteacher are, they invariably come back to me with qualities of fairness, empathy, passion for English, the ability to create a good learning environment, and skillful teaching methods. Those are human traits. Although AI can immitate those traits, at the end of the day, the human interaction that takes place in classrooms, especially when children are younger, is irreplaceable. I believe that adding AI abilities can greatly improve education, but it is the human + AI abilities that leads to superteaching abilities. It is not about the AI taking over for us, or us ceding our important work to AI, thinking that it can do it better.
I’m very excited about another year in education, and another year of exciting discoveries and innovations in teaching, learning, and human development. Oh, and writing!