Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have contributed significantly to the advancement of society. In recent years, AI-powered writing assistants have received increasing attention among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) communities. However, most of these digital writing tools focus on the revision and editing stages. Few digital tools are developed to help users during the writing process, such as assisting users in formulating or translating their ideas into writing. Wordtune is an AI-powered writing assistant that understands the writer’s ideas and suggests options for rewriting them using different tones (e.g. casual, formal) and lengths (e.g. shorten, expand). This tool can help EFL writers maintain a continuous flow and learn useful ways to express their ideas in written English. This tech review aims to provide an overview of Wordtune and its affordance in English writing for EFL writers, while also addressing the benefits and limitations of this technology.

The aim of this study is to uncover how students’ practices of writing in higher education are being impacted by ChatGPT. The use of ChatGPT and other generative AI needs to be set in the context of a longer-term process of the digitisation of writing, where many tools are being employed by students to support writing because it is a complex iterative process. Generative AI appears to have had a large impact on how students write, and we propose a model of generative AI literacy to assess their capabilities in doing so. Semi-structured interviews and observation data were collected at a British University with 23 students from diverse backgrounds, including the UK, USA, China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. The data was analysed thematically. It was found that students used ChatGPT alongside many other tools, and in rather individualistic ways often to address specific challenges they felt they had with writing. Their main concerns were around plagiarism, information inaccuracy and technology dependence. There was a relatively weak understanding or interest in the ethical issues around the exploitative and environmental impacts of generative AI. The social controversy around ChatGPT can be seen as a useful opportunity to engage students in a discussion about the digitisation of writing and promote AI literacy in this context.

Generative Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), powered by advanced language models like GPT-4, represent a transformative approach to personalized education through real-time adaptability, dynamic content generation, and interactive learning. This study presents a modular framework for designing and evaluating such systems, leveraging GPT-4’s capabilities to enable Socratic-style interactions and personalized feedback. A pilot implementation, the Socratic Playground for Learning (SPL), was tested with 30 undergraduate students, focusing on foundational English skills. The results showed significant improvements in vocabulary, grammar, and sentence construction, alongside high levels of engagement, adaptivity, and satisfaction. The framework employs lightweight JSON structures to ensure scalability and versatility across diverse educational contexts. Despite its promise, challenges such as computational demands and content validation highlight the main areas for future refinement. This research establishes a foundational approach for advancing Generative ITSs, offering key insights into personalized learning and the broader potential of Generative AI in education.

The use of virtual learning communities has shown great potential for language education. Research suggests that video-conferencing technology can assist teachers in creating such communities for second-language teaching. Gather.Town is a gamified, video-conferencing platform that revolutionizes the traditional static video-conferencing experience for language learners. It provides users with a 2D map with avatar-based game features utilizing proximity-based video-conferencing functionality which enhance student online engagement and promote interaction that resembles real-life conditions. Gather.Town has received increasing attention from educational researchers since its launch in May 2020; however, its adoption in language classrooms has not yet been explored. This review paper aims to introduce Gather.Town to language teachers and researchers to enhance student engagement in virtual learning communities.

Challenges and barriers arise when people communicate interculturally. The situations become more complicated when patients and health professionals from different cultural backgrounds communicate with each other on the sensitive topic of sexual health. This study conducted a systematic review of past literature to identify challenges and perspectives in the intercultural communication between patients and health professionals on the topic of sexual health. The results indicate the research trends and themes generated from narrative data. Language barriers, gender, and privacy concerns of sexual health information present significant challenges in the intercultural communication between patients with immigration backgrounds and health professionals. The perspectives of patients and professionals are included in the research paper.

Academic integrity is at the heart of excellent education. However, resources explaining the concept tend to be definition-driven, while using complex language and sometimes even an austere tone designed to discourage students from breaches. This study aims to design and evaluate an online module at a UK University across 2 years, designed to improve students’ understanding of concepts of academic integrity and practice. The module includes a range of interactive resources (e.g., gamified quizzes and e-booklets) and was made available to a large cohort of postgraduate students (448). The study adopts a mixed-methods approach composed of three sequential phases involving first collecting students’ views on existing academic integrity resources (7 students participating in a focus group and 39 competing a questionnaire), then developing a range of new ones based on students’ feedback to form the content of the module, and finally gathering students’ evaluation on the newly created resources (sample size: 361 students). Results illustrate a clear improvement in relation to the accessibility, usefulness and understandability of new resources. Results also highlight a remarkable increase in student confidence levels regarding academic integrity. Students also considered the new module as more appealing and informative. This manuscript offers a good example of a pedagogical approach aimed at promoting academic integrity in an innovative and engaging fashion.