Practical Proficiency Podcast · Devon Gunning | La Libre Language Learning

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

·35 min·2 clips

Devon says out-of-class writing assignments are now a waste of time if a bot can do them in six seconds.

1. Practical Proficiency Podcast #46 focuses on AI in the world language classroom and how it changes proficiency-oriented instruction. 2. Devon Gunning hosts the episode and identifies herself as a teacher, author, conference host, curriculum creator, and consultant behind La Libre Language Learning. 3. The episode asks whether AI is a threat, a tool, or a new reason to rethink what language teachers assign. 4. Devon compares today’s AI shift to the early internet and remembers a fourth-grade library lesson about online encyclopedias. 5. She says her teacher warned, “you can’t trust everything that you read on the internet,” and tied that lesson to citing sources. 6. Devon says her own child in fourth grade already knows what AI is and is not phased by it. 7. She connects that familiarity to the Tony Stark-style screen idea from Iron Man and says AI is now part of students’ world. 8. Devon argues that AI can be a “workhorse assistant” for grading, rubrics, emails, and other classroom busywork. 9. She also says AI can help resource creators by making it easier to replicate basic materials that used to take extra planning time. 10. Devon compares AI to the old teacher-cadet model, where students handled attendance, copies, lamination, and paper inbox tasks. 11. Her first practical example is accents: she writes freely, sends the text to AI, and asks it to correct Spanish and French diacritics. 12. She says this saves her from repeated keyboard shortcuts and from checking every accent manually. 13. She then uses AI as a rudimentary editor for Spanish 1 readers, asking it to add bullets, summarize paragraphs, and rephrase text for extra repetitions. 14. She says AI can also shorten or reformat long stories into more level-appropriate readings for level 1 classes. 15. Devon’s next example is question generation, where she asks AI for comprehension questions based on ACTFL 2024 performance indicators. 16. She also uses AI for PQA and circling prompts, asking for funny, dynamic, comprehensible questions around topics like family. 17. For differentiation, she says AI can generate ideas for struggling students, visual scaffolds, challenge work, and no-copy extensions. 18. Devon says the episode’s ethics section centers on plagiarism, AI-proofing, environmental impact, and keeping students honest about authorship. 19. The tone is direct, practical, and conversational, with long explanatory stretches and repeated rhetorical questions aimed at classroom use. 20. Language teachers, CI teachers, and TPT creators will get the most from this episode, while listeners looking for theory-heavy AI analysis may skip it.

As heard by us

A practical take on AI that keeps teacher judgment at the center.

The episode treats AI as a classroom helper, not a cure-all, and that makes the advice useful for world language teachers in proficiency-oriented classes.

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Why you'd press play

You need a first-pass way to generate world-language questions without losing native-speaker nuance.

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