Opening the Black Box: Critical GenAI Literacy in Practice for ELT

What does it take to turn what GenAI can produce into something worth teaching with?

GenAI can write a lesson plan in seconds, but only teachers can tell whether it works for their students. In this program, participants will explore how GenAI works, test its limits, and learn to write advanced, pedagogically sound prompts. They will use their professional judgement to evaluate accuracy, language level, bias, and ethical concerns, and draw on global frameworks and MoNE guidance to make informed decisions about AI use in their classrooms.

By the end of the program, participants will be able to:

·       Write prompts that work. Move from “write a reading text about…” to advanced, CEFR-informed prompts, judge whether the outputs meet their learning goals, and build a reusable prompt bank for their teaching context.

·       Put popular tools to the test. Explore AI-powered teaching tools and consider what they do well, where they fall short, and what they mean for cost, privacy, and access.

·       Redesign AI-generated tasks and build no-code games. Make the pedagogical decisions AI cannot make, such as who talks to whom, whether support scaffolds or scripts, and what learners do after feedback. Turn lesson content into interactive games and activities without coding, and ask: do students need the target language to succeed, or can they click their way through?

·       Create a custom chatbot. Design a learning partner, a Socratic skill coach, or a story character for their learners, set its boundaries, and test whether it helps learners think or does the thinking for them.

The program is open to English language teachers working in middle and high schools. Participants will leave with a context-specific prompt bank, a classroom game prototype, a custom chatbot prototype, and a critical eye for what to use, adapt, or reject.

Selin Demir holds BA and MA degrees with honors in English Language Teaching from Maltepe University, Istanbul. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language Education at Bahçeşehir University. Her research interests include AI literacy in ELT, teacher education, and corpus linguistics in language pedagogy, with a particular focus on materials and coursebook evaluation. She currently works as an English instructor at a foundation university, teaching general, academic, and professional English.