A first grade child, whose parents moved from El Salvador to New York City earlier this year, leans over to chat with his classmate about a word problem. Several states south, a father, fresh off a move from Mexico, walks into a school in Washington County, Virginia, to register his daughter for classes.
These seem like ordinary occurrences in the K-12 world. The difference: The New York-based first grader is speaking into a new-age walkie-talkie, which then spits out English to her classmate. Similarly, the Virginia-based father wears eyeglasses that listen to his Spanish and translate the sentence through an app to the English-speaking school secretary.
Schools are embracing artificial intelligence to help with language translation. While teachers previously had to make do by using Google Translate — or in even earlier days, flagging the nearby foreign language teacher for assistance — institutions are discovering that new technology helps integrate the growing number of English-learner students — who now number more than 5 million across the country — and their families. While institutions are not advocating for the replacement of dedicated services that help children acquire English skills for the long term, AI — much like in other capacities within a school — is being used to facilitate communication in the short term.
“Last year I had students not participating, they didn’t have a lot of confidence,” Madison Weidner, a first grade teacher at a Title 1 school in New York City, says. “Can you imagine sitting in a classroom and they’re speaking a completely different language? I’ve noticed a huge difference with using [AI-enabled] tools. They’re not only participating in conversations with their peers but now they’re able to hear the gist of a lesson as well.”
Despite teaching in a traditional classroom, roughly one-third of Weidner’s 22 students receive ELL — or English language learner — services, with some of her students speaking no English at all.
“It seems crazy but we do find a way to communicate through hand gestures,” she says, although with ELL services, children get pulled for additional help as well. “Once you get to know the child, they find a way to communicate despite the language barrier. You may just miss a lot of key details.”
When she arrived at P.S. 142 Amalia Castro last fall, she was introduced to four small devices in her classroom called Pocketalk, purchased by the school, which allow a student to press a button and speak into the device, which translates to the other student.
She also uses Pear Deck, which provides translation tools for students to use during online-based lessons. For example, one of Weidner’s students spoke very good English but had trouble with math story problems. When using the “translate” tool, she began to drastically improve.
“She went from, ‘I don’t think I can’ to straight up proficiency,” Weidner says. “She got the math part and could break down the word problem, it was just the language barrier.”
Becky Huang, professor of multilingual language education at Ohio State University, says using AI-enabled devices can be a more common way to bridge the language gap, especially for students who need extra support and who are new to a school.
“You want students to be able to leverage their native language,” she says. “Otherwise it’s sink or swim, which is not a good approach.”
But both linguistics experts and educators who are experimenting with adopting the technology itself acknowledge the pitfalls that often go hand-in-hand with AI adoption, including continued concerns about data privacy, bias, and an over-reliance.
Concerns to Consider
Keith Perrigan, the superintendent at Virginia-based Washington County School District, offers four headsets called Duoecho Smart Glasses. It has a speaker on its ear piece that is connected to an app. When the speaker, typically Spanish-speaking in Washington County, says a statement, the app translates it to English, speaking the translation out loud for the other party to hear.
He says while the district has several AI-enabled headsets to help with translation among parents — most often used when enrolling their child in the district — the English learner students within the district use them only when absolutely necessary.
“It’s more of a crutch in the classroom,” he says, adding the students get inclusive services to help them become proficient in English. Roughly 130 out of 6,700 students in Perrigan’s district are English learners, with 13 native tongues represented among them. “Our number one goal is getting them fluent in reading, writing and understanding English as quickly as possible.”
Victor Lee, who leads the Stanford Accelerator for Learning’s AI+Education, agrees on the importance of using AI tools as a bridge, not a replacement for English learning services.
“On the one hand, it’s encouraging because it has the potential to increase participation and learning opportunities when differences in language are creating difficulty for them,” he says. “On the other side of it, I would hope as this technology gets used, it’s done so with caution and awareness of major limitations that exist, even with state-of-the-art devices. It’s considered one type of support for working across languages but there are many others that absolutely should be part of teachers’ repertoire.”
Weidner is also quick to acknowledge the AI systems are far from perfect.
“I’ll notice when a student is telling me something, whatever it translates back doesn’t make sense; you can tell when you’re saying something the child looks back at you, like, ‘Wait, what?’’’ she says. “And same with what they say back to me. As an adult I can use context clues, but it does happen a lot more often than I’d like it. I wish there was something that was 100 percent accurate, but there isn’t that just yet.”
Generative AI has trouble properly processing children’s voices, due to insufficient training data.
“AI is trained on large language models, so if they don’t have enough Mandarin-speaking children, they would mark everything wrong,” Huang says. “And there could be biases in language usage: Even in English, we have different varieties like British English. I think users, either students or teachers, have to think about what this particular AI is trained on.”
Weidner added if a child is more soft-spoken — which is typical with her English learner students who may be more shy to speak up — the Pocketalk system also has trouble translating.
Lawrence Paska, executive director of ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages), says translation apps, while useful in some cases, do not include important cultural context and nuance.
“We’re still working on reliability and validity; the big issue with any computer-based tool is context,” Paska says. “You can hold Google Translate up to a sign and it can translate it, but do I understand the context, the dialect?”
The ACTFL does not have specific guidelines on using AI for language learning. Paska says since the tech is “constantly changing,” the organization prefers to offer ongoing training, including webinars throughout the year and a focus group where members can share best practices.
The National Education Association outlines several unintended consequences that could come from multilingual learners using AI, including Paska’s mentioned loss of cultural context, missed opportunity for learner-educator interactions and impeded peer interaction.
Educators are often left to their literal own devices when it comes to AI and implementation, leading those with a propensity for education technology to step up. Weidner, for example, has her master’s degree in learning technology and experience design, and, along with her other first grade teachers, tasked herself with learning the AI technology tools.
Weidner added she is careful with her students relying too much on the translation devices, should they be placed in a second grade classroom the following year with a teacher that is less technologically inclined.
“If they go to second grade and their teachers don’t use it, then they’re back to square one,” she says. “There is part of accountability to release the scaffolding, to make sure they’re increasing their English vocabulary.”
