Join us for the first Language Matters! talk of the Spring 2026 semester. This is an extra special Language Matters! Our Director, Dr. Thomas Jesús Garza will be presenting the first talk of the semester and his last talk as Director of the Texas Language Center. 

Say What?! Artificial Intelligence in Support of Advanced Language Production 

Learners at the ACTFL Advanced threshold or higher, while being capable of producing connected, elaborated speech, often face challenges in initiating and organizing discourse around a proposition and related argumentation. ChatGPT and other Artificial Intelligence (AI)  apps can assist learners at this level to break out of this language “block” and move forward more readily in creating more fully organized paragraph-length speech.

This talk uses data from teaching Global Debate courses in Russian in which learners employ AI technologies to offer prompts, key lexicon, situational phrases—in Russian—that are then used to construct more complete cases, argumentation, and evidence for use in a formal team debate setting. By using these discourse “organizers,” learners can devote more time to fleshing out and developing their ideas into logical, persuasive speech.