Teaching English in the AI age Thursday 26 February 2026

US Eastern Standard Time (EST) 6.00 PM

Recording

Transcript: Teaching English in the AI age

Download transcript here

Thank you for joining. Today we’ll be talking about teaching English in the AI Age.

What could be more relevant? In education and book publishing, we focus on the classics for high school and university students, and we have also recently started publishing teaching materials as well. We want to engage with the teaching profession on methods for using AI, your experiences with AI, and to share how it’s benefiting your students and yourselves.

In many industries, people are very much about using AI — “If not, why not? If you’re not using these tools, why aren’t you using them?”

In education, of course, we see more caution, because we’re not sure whether AI will benefit students or make them lazy. Is it like introducing calculators too early, before students learn basic arithmetic? Will it hinder their reading skills and reading development? Will it improve their writing skills? We need to be much more considered about how and when we introduce AI tools to students.

AI tools are a major part of the workforce, and we don’t want students entering the workforce being unfamiliar with them — but that’s not going to happen. Everybody is using these tools at home, regardless of what schools allow.

Students will use AI at home to whatever extent they want in their own time. That doesn’t necessarily mean it should be open slather at school. There is a lot more that students learn at school aside from preparing for the workforce. And it’s not even about preparing them for the specific tools they’ll use, because today’s AI tools won’t be the same tools used in 5–10 years when today’s students are in the workforce.

English is here to prepare students for much broader skills — the ability to prepare an argument; the cultural, historical, and language learning that English gives. It is not about vocational skills, but about foundational skills for developing the human being to be a future citizen.

I mentioned the caution in education about using AI tools. On the positive side, one way of thinking about AI tools is this: before AI, you might have a student whose parent was an English teacher or had studied English literature, or was a lawyer — someone who could give a lot of valuable input at home. You would expect that student to be engaged, contributing, achieving good marks.

The AI tools we now have are a bit like that involved parent. Students can get help from a tool that previously only a lucky few could get. Or maybe a student’s parents studied science or maths, so they received help in those subjects but not in English. Now they can get expert help across the whole curriculum.

Regarding how AI tools are used: research suggests that certain parts of the brain switch off when we use them excessively. That is natural because we’re delegating thinking to the tool. We need to be careful about which parts of thinking we hand over. The article I read suggested that the best way to get the benefit of AI tools without losing thinking capacity is to develop the foundation in that subject yourself, and then use the AI tool to drill down further. That way, you accelerate your understanding while still developing your own cognitive framework.

Personally, in English, if I think about high school learning, I would have benefited from an AI tool in getting the “lay of the land.” Students are young and haven’t experienced much of the world. When they read Jane Austen or Macbeth, there is a lot requiring an understanding of the wider social context or adult mental scaffolding. Even Frankenstein — although Mary Shelley was only 18 — is full of knowledge of her time. Teenagers today don’t necessarily have that. AI tools can provide the general foundation and orientation. Once students understand the big picture, they can see how themes are relevant and then become more independent.

Detail oriented students (strong in maths or physics) might do well in subjects where detail is the core task. English requires both the big picture and the details, and AI tools can help students get the foundation and then zoom in.

Another area where AI helps is reducing the tedium of finding relevant passages. This only helps with take home assessments, not exams, but many of us remember knowing a passage existed but not remembering where. Even if you could search the text digitally, you might not recall the exact wording. Now you can ask ChatGPT, for example, “Where does Hotspur express resentment about King Henry and Bolingbroke?” and it will give five relevant quotes with act, scene, and line references — something that might take a student a long time.

This can reduce frustration and help students focus on analysis rather than on searching for the “needle in the haystack.”

Teachers have shared various techniques for using AI tools. One area is multimodal presentations. Students can generate images and animate them, even having characters “speak” lines. This makes learning more engaging and supports multimodal assignments.

Another idea is a game called Beat the Chat. The class is asked a question; a student answers it first, then you ask ChatGPT or Gemini, and compare the answers. Better still: have the student answer first so they aren't influenced by the AI. It becomes a fun and valuable comparison.

Another technique is to ask Gemini, for example, for the main themes at a high level, and then drill down as a class. This gives prompts for discussion and shows students that you’re engaging with the tools meaningfully.

There are many more techniques teachers have shared. I’ll finish here, since we don’t have many on the call. I will share those techniques separately — what teachers are using AI tools for, and what AI tools mean for the future teaching of English.

There is a lot of discussion about AI tools taking jobs traditionally done by doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. If AI takes over such tasks, what skills remain important?

Arguably, English is one of the skills that will remain irreplaceable, because it teaches what makes us human: the use of language, the ability to see the big picture, to read between the lines, to form a plan. English links with history and society. Even Frankenstein is a microcosm of what we are experiencing today with AI — questions about consciousness, and where machines will lead us. Mary Shelley prepared us for that.

English literature has a key role to play in this time of change with robotics and AI tools.

Click here for: More information about English teaching practices involving AI