ALL Language World 2025

March 16, 2025March 16, 2025

I was out waving the yellow flag for Linguascope, working the stands at the ALL Language World conference this weekend. Now, it’s not often I’ll rave about attending conferences. After all, they can be pretty dry affairs, especially as an exhibitor, where your main job is to smile and hand out goodie bags.

But there was something so positive about the vibe with this one. Perhaps it was the smaller scale and more intimate setting in rural Warwickshire. Maybe it was professional solidarity, after some tough years for secondary language pedagogy. Whatever the reason, it was a lovely opportunity to mix with other language professionals, faces both familiar and new.

One of the highlights was the keynote speech by Darren Paffey MP. Darren is one of the new 2024 intake of British MPs (and, we are told, one of only three Darrens to be elected to parliament!). Before being swiped by politics, Darren was a professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Southampton, and a long-time language learning enthusiast. The ideal guest, then, to reassure an anxious crowd, worn down by years of official neglect of languages on the curriculum, that he will be fighting our corner in the new government.

It’s not often we get one on the inside!

Darren Paffey MP with Didi, the Linguascope Dog at ALL Language World 2025.

Perhaps it was the encouraging tone of that keynote that helped buoy the mood. In any case, it was one of the nicest events, in terms of camaraderie, mutual support and optimism that I’ve attended in recent years. Props to the ALL for organising it, and for bagging such a thoroughly decent keynote speaker.

A robot reading a script. The text-to-speech voices at ElevenLabs certainly sound intelligent as well as natural!

ElevenLabs : 5-Star Tool for Language Work and Study

February 2, 2025

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know how impressed I’ve been at ElevenLabs, the text-to-speech creator that stunned the industry when its super-realistic voices were unleashed on the world. Since then, it’s made itself irreplaceable in both my work and study, and it bears spreading the word again: ElevenLabs is a blow-your-socks-off kind of tool for creating spoken audio content.

Professional Projects

In my work developing language learning materials for schools, arranging quality narration used to involve coordinating with agencies and studios — a process that was both time-consuming and costly. We’ve had issues with errors, too, which cost a project time with re-recordings. And that’s not to mention the hassle keeping sections up-to-date. Removing ‘stereo’ from an old vocab section (who has those now?) would usually trigger a complete re-record.

With ElevenLabs, I can now produce new sections promptly, utilising its impressive array of voices across multiple languages. The authenticity and clarity of these voices are fantastic – I really can’t understate it – and it’s made maintaining the biggest language learning site for schools so much easier.

Supporting Individual Learning

As a language learner, ElevenLabs is more than worth its salt, too. It’s particularly good for assembling short listening passages – about a minute long – to practise ‘conversation islands’—a well-regarded polyglot technique for achieving conversational fluency.

Beyond language learning, the tool can be a great support to other academic projects. I’ve created concise narrations of complex topics, converting excerpts from scholarly papers into audio format. Listening to these clips in spare moments (or even in the background while washing up) has helped cement some key concepts, and prime my mind for conventional close study.

Flexible and Affordable Plans

ElevenLabs offers a range of pricing options to suit different needs:

• Free Plan: Ideal for those starting out, this plan provides 10,000 characters per month, roughly equating to 10 minutes of audio.

• Starter Plan: At £5 per month, you receive 30,000 characters (about 30 minutes of audio), along with features like voice cloning and commercial use rights.

• Creator Plan: For £22 per month, this plan offers 100,000 characters (around 100 minutes of audio), plus professional voice cloning and higher-quality outputs.

For messing around, that free plan is not too stingy at all – you can really get a feel for the tool from it. Personally, I’ve not needed to move beyond the starter plan yet, which is pretty much a bargain at around a fiver a month.

Introducing ElevenReader

And there’s more! Complementing the TTS service, ElevenLabs has introduced ElevenReader, a free tool that narrates PDFs, ePubs, articles, and newsletters in realistic AI voices. Available on both iOS and Android platforms, the app doesn’t even consume credits from your ElevenLabs subscription plan.

Seriously, I can’t even believe this is still free – go and try it!

Final Thoughts

ElevenLabs has truly transformed the way I create and consume spoken content. It truly is my star tool from the current crop of AI-powered utilities.

The ElevenLabs free tier is enough for most casual users to have a dabble – go and try it today!

A robot playwright - now even more up-to-date with SearchGPT.

Topical Dialogues with SearchGPT

November 3, 2024

As if recent voice improvements weren’t enough of a treat, OpenAI has just introduced another killer feature to ChatGPT, one that can likewise beef up your custom language learning resources. SearchGPT enhances the LLM’s ability to access and incorporate bang up-to-date information from the web.

It’s a development that is particularly beneficial for language learners seeking to create study materials that reflect current events and colloquial language use. With few exceptions until now, LLMs like ChatGPT have had a ‘data cutoff’, thanks to mass text training having an end-point (albeit a relatively recent one). Some LLMs, like Microsoft’s Copilot, have introduced search capabilities, but their ability to retrieve truly current data could be hit and miss.

With SearchGPT, OpenAI appear to have cracked search accuracy a level to rival AI search tool Perplexity – right in the ChatGPT app. And it’s as simple as highlighting the little world icon that you might already have noticed under the prompt field.

The new SearchGPT icon in the ChatGPT prompt bar.

Infusing Prompts with SearchGPT

Switching this on alongside tried-and-tested language learning prompt techniques yields some fun – and pedagogically useful – results. For instance, you can prompt ChatGPT to generate dialogues or reading passages based on the latest news from your target language country/ies. Take this example:

A language learning dialogue on current affairs in German, beefed up by OpenAI’s SearchGPT

SearchGPT enables content that mirrors real-life discussion with contemporary vocabulary and expressions (already something it was great at). But it also incorporates accurate, up-to-the-minute, and even cross-referenced information. That’s a big up for transparency.

Unsure where that info came from? Just click the in-text links!

Enhancing Speaking Practice with Authentic Contexts

Beyond reading, these AI-generated dialogues serve as excellent scripts for speaking practice. Learners can role-play conversations, solo or group-wise, to improve pronunciation, intonation, and conversational flow. This method bridges the gap between passive understanding and active usage, a crucial step in achieving fluency.

Incorporating SearchGPT into your language learning content creation toolbox reconnects your fluency journey with the real, evolving world. Have you used it yet?

Apples and oranges, generated by Google's new image algorithm Imagén 3

Google’s Imagén 3 : More Reliable Text for Visual Resources

October 13, 2024October 13, 2024Leave a comment

If you use AI imaging for visual teaching resources, but decry its poor text handling, then Google might have cracked it. Their new algorithm for image generation, Imagén 3, is much more reliable at including short texts without errors.

What’s more, the algorithm is included in the free tier of Google’s LLM, Gemini. Ideal for flashcards and classroom posters, you now get quite reliable results when prompting for Latin-alphabet texts on the platform. Image quality seems to have improved too, with a near-photographic finish possible:

A flashcard produced with Google Gemini and Imagén 3.

The new setup seems marginally better at consistency of style, too. Here’s a second flashcard, prompting for the same style. Not quite the same font, but close (although in a different colour).

A flashcard created with Google Gemini and Imagén 3.

It’s also better at real-world details like flags. Prompting in another engine for ‘Greek flag’, for example, usually results in some terrible approximation. Not in Imagén 3 – here are our apples and oranges on a convincing Greek flag background:

Apples and oranges on a square Greek flag, generated by Google’s Imagén 3

It’s not perfect, yet. For one thing, it performed terribly with non-Latin alphabets, producing nonsense each time I tested it. And while it’s great with shorter texts, it does tend to break down and produce the tell-tall typos with anything longer than a single, short sentence. Also, if you’re on the free tier, it won’t allow you to create images of human beings just yet.

That said, it’s a big improvement on the free competition like Bing’s Image Creator. Well worth checking out if you have a bunch of flashcards to prepare for a lesson or learning resource!

French Coffee Breaks

August 11, 2024Leave a comment

If you know me, you’ll know that French was long my ‘also ran’ language – solid but under-used and under-practised. But that’s been changing more and more in recent years, as the language has been unexpectedly useful for a whole range of reasons. So this week, here’s a wee heads-up from me about a book I’ve been finding super useful for brushing up my French: 50 French Coffee Breaks.

I’ve been aware of the Coffee Breaks Languages brand for a while, thanks to their series of podcasts. They’re not actually a resource I’d used much in the past, as I had the impression the level was a bit basic. Wrong false impressions – I was pepped up by their Swedish ‘holiday soap opera’ lately, which was far from beginners-only, and really helped prepare for a trip to Malmö.

Anyway, roll on to now, and me, searching for something to improve my French. I’m a repeat false beginner – I did French at school, but ditched it for German and Spanish early on. Since then, though, it’s become incredibly useful (and attractive) as the language of a wonderful country that is very close to my own, and so very easy to visit! Cue lots of ‘improve my French’ blitz sessions over the years.

French Coffee Breaks

For that French blitz, there are a couple of good, systematic improve-your-French books about, including the excellent Teach Yourself French Tutor, which I’ve used for grammar training. And it’s Teach Yourself that are behind the 50 Coffee Break books too, so there’s heritage and form backing the format.

The approach couldn’t be better for a busy linguist fitting in an extra maintenance language amidst everything else. The chapters offer 5, 10 and 15-minute practice sessions, across a range of useful (very travel-friendly) topics. In fact, they generally took me less time, depending on the level, but in every case they either strengthened something I’d half-forgotten, or taught me something new.

It’s definitely the kind of book you’ll want to write on and deface with a pen – anathema I know (books are my temple too!) but I made an exception with this one. There’s something very satisfying about filling it with scribble, and the pocket paperback format is perfect for it (I’d never sully my Teach Yourself Tutor books this way, mind!).

Overall, a fab purchase that has confirmed how useful the Coffee Break Languages materials are after all. I was thrilled to see that a Swedish version was released only last year too, something that had escaped my attention. Needless to say, I’ve got that one on my shelf now too…

Robots exchanging gifts. We can exchange - and adapt - digital resources now, with Claude's shareable Artifacts.

Sharing Your Language Learning Games with Claude Artifacts

July 14, 2024Leave a comment

If Claude’s recent improvements weren’t already impressive enough, Anthropic has only gone and done it again – this time, by making Artifacts shareable.

Artifacts are working versions of the programs and content you, the user, prompt for in Claude. For example, they pop up when you ask the AI to write a language practice game in HTML, running the code it writes as a playable activity. Instant language learning games – no coding required.

Now, you can share your working, fully playable creations, with a simple link.

Instant Spanish Quiz with Claude

Take this simple Spanish quiz (very topical given the forthcoming Euros 2024 final!). I prompted for it as follows:

Create an original, self-contained quiz in Spanish for upper beginner / lower intermediate students of the language, on the topic “Spain in the European Football Championships”. It should be completely self-contained in an HTML page. The quiz should be multiple choice, with ten questions each having four alternative answer buttons – only one is right, and there is always one ‘funny’ alternative answer in the mix too.
Every time the quiz is played, the questions and the answers are in a random order. The student can keep trying answers until they get the right one (obviously after clicking an answer button, it should be disabled). Incorrect buttons turn red – correct ones green. Keep score of the player’s accuracy as they work through the questions (number of correct clicks / total clicks).
Make sure it looks attractive, slick and smart too, with CSS styling included in the HTML page.

If you have Artifacts turned on (see here for more). you should see your working game appear in a new pane. But now, you’ll also see a little Publish link in the bottom-right corner. Click this, and you can choose to make your creation public with an access link.

Publishing your working language activities using a share link with Claude Artifacts

Remixing Artifacts

But wait – there’s more. When colleagues access your Artifact, they will see a Remix button in that bottom-right corner.

Remixing Artifacts in Claude

By hitting that, they can pick up where you left off and tweak your materials with further prompting. For instance, to keep the quiz format but change the language and topic, they could simply ask:

Now create a version of this quiz for French learners on the topic “France at the Olympic Games”.

It makes for an incredibly powerful way to network your learning resources. It’s also perfectly possible to take advantage of all this using only Claude’s free tier, which gives you 10 or so messages every few hours.

More than enough to knock up some learning games.

Have you created anything for colleagues to adapt and share on in Claude? Let us know in the comments!

ChatGPT, Your Way : Custom GPTs In The Wild!

November 12, 20231 Comment

This week saw one of the biggest recent developments in consumer AI. ChatGPT released GPTs – customisable AI bots – into the wild for Plus members, and the community has gone wild.

In a nutshell, GPTs are AI bots with custom behaviour that you define. And you define that behaviour using natural language, just like how you talk to regular ChatGPT.

Crucially, GPTs are shareable. So you can come up with a killer app idea, set it up in seconds, then share your creation with the world. Already, linguists and language lovers are sharing their creations on the socials.

ChatGPT for Worksheet Creation

Obviously, I couldn’t wait to get playing when the GPT creation tool went live this week. I’ve long been a cheerleader for topic-based units for independent study, especially when preparing for spoken lessons. So the first thing I coded up was a foreign language worksheet creator!

It’s the kind of thing I’ve been writing and sharing prompts about for a while, now. The big game-changer, of course, is that now, all that functionality is packaged up into a single, one-click module. Open it, tell it your language, topic and level, and watch it go. This will produce a range of resources and activities for independent learning, including a vocabulary list, reading comprehensions, and cloze quizzes.

Genuinely useful for self-study!

Foreign Language Worksheet Creator GPT in ChatGPT

It’s already been a learning experience, for all of us tinkerers. For one thing, I found out not to overload it by trying to do too much at once, or turning on all its capabilities (browsing, code interpretation and image creation). I ended up with a uselessly slow initial version that I can no longer even reopen to edit.

Ah well – these things make us!

Old English Monkeys

When you do get a working version, however, you can boggle at the versatility of it. That’s thanks to the billions of training points backing up the platform. I asked it to create an Old English worksheet on the topic “Monkeys”, in the style of a Modern Languages worksheet, as a cheeky wee test. Admittedly, ChatGPT did say that it would be a challenging task. After all, just how many Old English documents do researchers train their LLMs on? But the results were really not bad at all…

An Old English worksheet in ChatGPT

I expect many of us are playing these games, pushing the new tech to see how far it can go. At the very least, we can all revisit those isolated prompt ideas we’ve been collecting over the past months, and turn them into shareable GPTs – for work and for fun.

Have you had chance to play yet? Share your proud creations with us in the comments!

A neon lock with a glowing owl motif, reminiscent of Duolingo

Green Handcuffs – Duolingo and the Walled Garden of Welsh

October 29, 2023October 29, 20231 Comment

What happens when you pour your heart into learning a language on service X, then service X mothballs the resource? It’s a situation many Welsh learners found themselves in this week, as Duolingo announced an indefinite pause to further development of its Welsh course.

The immediate question is where do these learners go? There are other Welsh courses, of course, like the excellent materials at LearnWelsh.cymru. But the Duolingo announcement begs a further question: how do these learners take their progress with them? Progress data, the result of weeks, months, years of hard learning work, is locked into Duolingo’s proprietary system.

Now, you can already request your personal data from Duolingo. The Duolingo Data Vault is definitely a welcome addition in data transparency, allowing you to access personal data records the site holds on you. But crucially, language-based progress is missing. There’s nothing to say what you’ve studied, item for item. That means there’s no way to pick up where you left off elsewhere, with a true record of where you are.

No wonder users feel a bit stuck inside a course consigned to gather dust.

Duolingo Data Vault files, unzipped.

Interoperability and Language Learning

It all sounded very familiar after tech activist Cory Doctorow’s recent discussion of open internet practices in The Internet Con. This quick read (well worth a look for anyone invested in apps and services – ie., all of us) bemoans the walled gardens that Big Tech firms have become. They’re great places to be, when they work for/with us. But when they suddenly change at the whim of execs, the lack of interoperability – standards or conventions that allow you to use data from one service on another – leaves us stranded and at their mercy.

Don’t like a recent update? Tough, you’ll just have to stay, or start from scratch on another service.

It’s not for a lack of standards. Language learning platforms have long used industry-wide formats to allow interoperability. Take the plain old CSV (comma-separated value) spec. You’ve long been able export your Anki deck in this plain text format, and import it into another service like Quizlet or Educandy.

Not to be too hard on Duolingo (we love it really), there’s a clear counterargument to allowing full export of full vocabulary and phrase lists, as with Anki and Quizlet decks. The full complement of learning text is the result of lots of hard work on company time; it’s a copyrighted resource just as a course book is.

Opening the Duolingo Garden Wall

But when it’s tied to user progress, it becomes something else; a personal record of items we’ve committed to memory. Other programs export this as a matter of course. Anki, for example, will export frequency and accuracy data alongside vocabulary item entries. It shouldn’t be too hard to export this subset of Duolingo material in a universal format that could be loaded without fuss into an app like Anki.

Duolingo might well fret about losing users if the effort costs of leaving were reduced like this. No big tech corp is under obligation to organise its data in a way that helps users migrate. But you can imagine a world of interoperable ‘take your data with you’ standards to have a double-edged benefit.

First off, it could incentivise Duolingo to strive for constant betterment, to be additive rather than reductive in its updates. The race would be to the top, rather than the bottom, to maintain a winning app for all. There’d be an open door, but nobody would feel the need to defect (or the resentment that they can’t).

Likewise, there’s a general benefit even if the resources simply aren’t there for a Welsh continuation on Duo. Course migration standards would allow smaller companies to step in and fill in the gaps. Duo could focus on its core projects and nobody would feel linguistically homeless. And, of course, if Duolingo offered the missing service again in future, it would be easy to move right back.

Perhaps it’s time to make a request of our beloved owl in the name of an open web for linguists. As the trailblazer that you are, could you be a leader in open standards, prising ajar the door to these walled gardens?

A neon globe surrounded by books - the AI future is here.

AI for Language Teachers – the Essential Bookshelf

September 30, 2023October 14, 2023Leave a comment

Clearly, emerging Artificial Intelligence platforms have colossal potential to transform education. Indeed, they are already doing so, proving to innovative disruptors that teachers and students are still grappling to understand. Given the pace of change, where can educators find solid training on practical, classroom-ready AI techniques?

Thankfully, a raft of publications has sprung up with teaching practice at its core. Many of the best titles are from author-educators who have self-published from personal experience. Self-publishing, of course, is a quick, reactive way to get books out there, so it’s unsurprising that there are so many gems that don’t originate with big publishing houses.

It must be said that the majority of current titles are US-centric – again, unsurprising, given that largely US-based AI companies have generally release the leading-edge innovations in the US first. That said, the following picks are all notable for a universal approach, with a generality that should make them useful whatever the setting.

Without further ado, here is the language teacher’s essential AI bookshelf!

The Essential AI Bookshelf

THE AI CLASSROOM

The AI Classroom With five-star reviews almost across the board, the authors of The AI Classroom were quick off the mark; the book has become an early leader for practical teaching ideas utilising artificial intelligence. It contains a broad range of ready-to-use prompts, perhaps the most reliable hallmark of the best AI guides for teachers and learners on the market at the moment. What is particularly insightful is the discussion of school policy as an important consideration – an indispensable consideration, particularly for department heads and administrators.

THE AI INFUSED CLASSROOM

The AI Infused Classroom by Holly Clark is a practical and visionary guide for educators who want to use emerging LLM tools to transform teaching and learning. Clark, a seasoned teacher and edtech expert, is author of The Infused Classroom series, which explores how to amplify student voices with technology. This book builds on those ideas, demonstrating how to leverage AI as a catalyst for innovation, creativity, and deep learning. The book adopts a refreshingly student-centred approach to classroom AI, and is a source of invaluable best practice for teachers of languages and otherwise.

AI FOR LEARNING

Part of the AI for Everything series, AI for Learning is a book that explores how the medium can, and should, positively impact human learning in various contexts. The authors offer a clear and engaging introduction to the concepts, applications, and implications of AI for learning. The book serves as both an explanatory introduction and practical guide, covering topics from core concepts of AI to how it can develop critical thinking and digital citizenship skills, and prepare learners for the future of work and learning. The book also addresses the ethical and social issues that arise from using AI for learning, such as privacy, bias, accountability, and trust.

80 WAYS TO USE CHATGPT IN THE CLASSROOM

You can’t beat a good old ‘X ways to do…’ guidebook, and this volume boasts an impressive 80 of them! 80 Ways to Use ChatGPT in the classroom gets straight down to brass tacks with organised, practical prompt examples. A particular strength of this book is a welcome nod to balance throughout, with ample discussion of the issues as well as the well-fanfared benefits. As one of the earliest of these guides to appear, the focus is ChatGPT. However, as with all of these books, the knowledge is easily transferrable to other platforms.

AI FOR LANGUAGE LEARNERS

As the only title to focus specifically on languages – and the one I penned myself – I could hardly leave out AI for Language Learners! Written to be accessible to individual learners as well as classroom teachers, it’s packed full of practical prompt ideas. These cover language reference, practice activities and resource creation. What’s more, the book includes access to a website with copy-paste prompt for those with the paperback. That is definitely a boon to those those typing fingers! The book was a labour of love over summer 2023, and is the product some very enthusiastic experimentation to support my own polyglot learning. I hope you have as much fun trying the prompts as I did writing them.

Brave New World

As AI comes to land firmly in classrooms over the coming months, we’ll undoubtedly be seeing title after title appear. Are there any favourite titles of yours that we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments!

Fun With Texts : Travel Edition

September 24, 2023September 24, 2023Leave a comment

I came across an ancient video this week that took me right back. The video in question was from a series of video diary entries I made on a trip to Austria in 2004. In this particular segment, I was proudly showing off the stash of free leaflets I’d cached from Klagenfurt town hall – treasures of authentic texts to take home for my teaching materials box.

German-language texts from Austria - leaflets about the EU in 2004

Austrian leaflets about the EU (2004)

A still of Rich West-Soley showing some leaflets from Austria in a video from 2004

Showing off my Austrian leaflet haul in 2004 in a video shot on a phone just a little more sophisticated than a toaster, judging from the quality

Fast forward 19 years, and I’m approaching the end of a wonderful, extended trip around Greece. It’s been a holiday full of wonderful sights, amazing food, and of course, lots of language practice. Incidentally, Greeks must be amongst the most encouraging people on the planet when you try to speak their language.

But what links this trip with that early noughties vid is that continued fascination with curating authentic texts. It’s a polyglot obsession that’s lasted well beyond my classroom teaching days; there’s no longer any teaching materials box to fill, but I’m still on the hunt.

Hunting Texts : Then and Now

The format has changed, naturally. It’s less about free brochures and leaflets now. Alas, my EasyJet baggage allowance won’t quite stretch to that any more. This time, it’s digital – and I’ve been going to town collecting text samples for my virtual Greek learning box.

Of course, Greece has a tradition of texts that stretches back a little further than many fellow European countries. It’s been particularly fun looking out for inscriptions on the many ancient monuments, and spotting similarities and differences between the ancient and modern languages.

A stone tablet in an Ancient Greek ruin, with a partial inscription in Greek

Authentic Texts in stone!

An Ancient Greek artefact

But it’s the modern examples that really hit the spot – the more everyday and prosaic the better. From bags of crisps to public notices, every bit of writing is a potential new word learnt, and an extra peep into the target language culture. It’s addictive.

Save water, and save those words (in Anki!)

A washing machine control panel with Greek labelling

It’ll all come out in the wash

As far as I’m concerned, there’s never any going over-the-top when collecting digital texts. Knock yourself out with as much target language as you can! The criteria for what makes an authentic text are wildly broad – it can be the odd couple of words, a text-dense poster or an entire book. It all has worth to us as learners, no matter how long.

The only rule I try to stick to is one of practical use; I aim to try and use the images somewhere, be it a blog post (like this one on German political posters) or by scraping the language for Anki flashcard entries.

Language snacks

Are you a curator of authentic texts in your target language? How do you collect them, and what do you do with them afterwards? Let us know in the comments!

Polyglossic

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ALL Language World 2025