EdTech in Language Learning Archives

Layered translucent glass panes suspended in dark blue space, each etched with glowing abstract letterforms from a different writing system, overlapping and interlocking where the panes cross.

AI in Education

Verónica Speaks Twelve Languages. The Hard Part Was the Rules.

Verónica, the AI tutor inside our courses and apps, now responds in twelve languages. Arabic, Telugu, Tamil, and Korean joined because districts and teacher preparation faculty kept describing the families they serve. Adding the languages was never the hard part, since these models were multilingual from the start. The hard part was the rules: which characters even count as letters, whether the page or the person gets to decide, and when a tutor should hold the target language instead of following a student into English. Here is what broke, what we changed, and why it matters.

Chalkboard reading Language Learning beside German, English, and Spanish dictionaries, for the Enabling Learning post on building AI language-learning tutors.

AI in Education

A Good LLM Doesn’t Make a Good Teacher

When people learn that our speaking apps run on advanced AI, they ask which model we use. It is the least interesting part of the story. Choosing a capable model is the easy part; any developer can connect to one. What decides whether a learner actually improves is whether the system understands how people learn to speak a second language. That knowledge does not come from the model. It comes from us, from years in bilingual classrooms, instructional design, and second language acquisition research. This post is about how we build AI tutors as educators, not just engineers.

A young student speaking out loud into a smartphone showing a live voice practice app with the Veronica AI tutor, warm afternoon light

AI in Education

Studying Is Not the Same as Speaking

I have watched it happen more times than I can count. A candidate who knows the material cold sits down for the speaking section and freezes. Studying is not the same as speaking. For two years our online courses have given AI feedback on recorded speaking and writing, and that is still there. But feedback on a recording is not a conversation. Our two new apps add the part a course never could: a live, two-way voice conversation with AI characters who push back, scored on a seven-trait rubric, with Verónica remembering every session. Practice is what closes the gap.

A young Latino student studying for a college placement exam at a laptop showing the multilingual Veronica AI tutor chat panel

AI in Education

Lowering the Filter and Making It Comprehensible, One Student at a Time

One afternoon while volunteering with the Bilingual Homework Hotline, I sat with a high school student newly arrived from a Spanish-speaking country. His homework was in English, and he was visibly stressed. We worked through it together in Spanish, and by the end of the session he thanked me many times, saying he finally had an idea of how to do his homework. That moment brought Krashen’s hypotheses alive and shaped how we built Verónica, our multilingual AI tutor. Today we are launching two new apps: TSIA Prep for college placement and our High School Equivalency Exam Prep (GED® Test).

Painted illustration of a thoughtful scholar with delicate calligraphic ribbons of multilingual glyphs flowing around her, evoking the multilingual foundation of modern AI.

AI in Education

Why Modern AI Was Built Multilingual From the Start, and What That Means for Language Learning

Multilingual capability is not a feature that frontier AI labs added on top of an English-only base. It is built into the foundation. Meta now translates 1,600 languages, Google DeepMind covers 400 in pretraining, OpenAI and Anthropic post strong cross-lingual scores, and a 2025 paper showed models can learn new vocabulary from a handful of examples. We walk through what this architecture means for second-language teaching, and how our model-agnostic approach lets us pick the right model for each task in BTLPT, TOEFL, LOTE, AI Language Labs, and Praxitude.

EdTech

What No Man’s Sky Can Teach Us About Good Learning

When my son asked to buy No Man’s Sky, I did what I always do: I researched it. What I found was a game that teaches chemistry, problem-solving, exploration, and language acquisition better than many textbooks I have read. Seymour Papert argued decades ago that curriculum designers have a lot to learn from video game designers, and this game is a living example of why. From Vygotsky’s scaffolding to a Rosetta Stone style language mechanic, the learning design is remarkable. Underneath it all is a family story about shared curiosity, audiobooks, Artemis Two, and exploring the universe together.

Tag: EdTech in Language Learning

Verónica Speaks Twelve Languages. The Hard Part Was the Rules.

A Good LLM Doesn’t Make a Good Teacher

Studying Is Not the Same as Speaking

Lowering the Filter and Making It Comprehensible, One Student at a Time

Why Modern AI Was Built Multilingual From the Start, and What That Means for Language Learning

What No Man’s Sky Can Teach Us About Good Learning