Engagement, attention, motivation and the challenges of teaching languages in the age of AI

Introduction

A few months ago, I delivered a keynote in Sydney entitled Language Teaching at a Crossroads: Engagement, Evidence, and the AI Disruption. In that talk, I explored some of the challenges confronting language education today, from declining uptake and growing disengagement to the impact of digital technology, fragmented attention and artificial intelligence on how young people learn. This article revisits the keynote’s central arguments and considers their implications for curriculum design and classroom practice.

My central contention was that we are witnessing a growing mismatch between what successful language learning demands and the cognitive, emotional and behavioural habits that the modern environment is fostering in our students.

1. The great mismatch

Second-language acquisition is, by its very nature, a gradual and cumulative process. Learners need repeated encounters with language, opportunities to process it meaningfully, retrieval practice and extensive rehearsal before knowledge becomes sufficiently accessible for fluent, spontaneous communication.There are no shortcuts to automaticity. Knowing a word or grammatical structure is not the same as being able to retrieve and use it accurately, rapidly and effortlessly under communicative pressure. That requires time and repeated successful processing.

However, several characteristics of contemporary digital life may make these demands harder for some learners to accommodate. The constant availability of immediate answers, short-form content, rapid changes of focus and instant feedback can encourage expectations of quick results and continuous stimulation.

Language learning, by contrast, frequently involves delayed rewards. Progress is incremental and not always immediately visible. As we observe in our lessons day in day out, learners understand something today and struggle to retrieve it tomorrow. They may recognise a structure in a reading text but be unable to produce it spontaneously. They may perform successfully during a lesson only to discover a week later that much of what they appeared to know has faded. And these experiences are perfectly normal! They are part of learning. Yet students often interpret them as evidence of inability rather than as a sign that more processing and practice are needed.

The instructional implications are considerable: we cannot eliminate the cognitive demands of language learning, but we can make them more manageable through careful sequencing, appropriate scaffolding, cumulative practice and frequent opportunities for successful retrieval.

2. The illusion of engagement

One of the developments that concerns me most is the increasing pressure on teachers to make lessons constantly entertaining.Of course, enjoyment matters. Students who find lessons interesting and rewarding are generally more likely to participate and persist. However, we need to distinguish between engagement with an activity and engagement in the cognitive processes that produce learning.

A classroom can be noisy, energetic and apparently enthusiastic without much durable learning taking place! Students may enjoy a game, participate enthusiastically in a competition or complete an entertaining digital activity while engaging only superficially with the language itself. I have seen it in many lessons I have observed over the years.Conversely, a quieter activity involving careful listening, repeated reading, sentence reconstruction or retrieval practice may look less exciting to an observer while producing much more substantial learning!

The distinction between immediate performance and long-term learning, discussed by Bjork and Bjork (2011), is particularly relevant here. What students can do successfully during an activity does not necessarily tell us what they will remember or be able to retrieve independently days or weeks later. hence, the question we should be asking is not simply whether students enjoyed the lesson or appeared engaged, but what cognitive processing the activities required and whether that processing is likely to result in durable learning.

Mind you, I am not arguing against fun. I am arguing against confusing fun with effectiveness.

3. When failure breeds disengagement

We frequently talk about a crisis of motivation in language learning, particularly when discussing declining uptake at GCSE and equivalent qualifications. Yet I believe we sometimes reverse the direction of causality. We assume that students fail because they are disengaged, when in many cases they may become disengaged because they repeatedly experience failure.

Consider for instance the student in your class who cannot understand spoken French, struggles to remember vocabulary, finds grammatical explanations confusing and freezes when asked to speak. After enough unsuccessful experiences, that student may stop interpreting these difficulties as temporary obstacles and begin seeing them as evidence of a more permanent inability.Their internal narrative becomes not ‘I need more practice’ but the much more tragic ‘I am rubbish at languages’.

This is where self-efficacy, in Bandura’s (1997) sense, becomes crucial. Learners’ beliefs about their ability to succeed influence the effort they invest, their willingness to persevere and their responses to setbacks.

In the keynote, I proposed a model of sustained motivation built around three positive drivers: self-efficacy, relevance and enjoyment, with perceived cost acting as a potential counterweight.

Students need to believe that they can succeed, see value in what they are learning and experience sufficient enjoyment to want to continue. At the same time, the perceived costs of learning — excessive effort, anxiety, embarrassment or repeated failure — must not become overwhelming.

This has important implications for classroom practice. We need to engineer success without removing appropriate challenge. We need to make progress visible, create opportunities for students to experience genuine competence and ensure that tasks are sufficiently scaffolded to allow learners to succeed through their own efforts.

As I have said many times before in my workshops and blog/social media posts: success is not merely the consequence of motivation. It can also be one of its most powerful sources!

4. Fragmented attention, fragmented learning

Another major concern I explored in the keynote was the impact of increasingly fragmented attention, particularly in light of research on media multitasking, smartphone interruptions and attentional switching, which suggests that frequent distractions can interfere with sustained cognitive processing. Repeatedly switching between tasks incurs cognitive costs, especially when learners are processing unfamiliar information and must devote considerable mental resources to understanding, interpreting and retaining it.

This is particularly consequential in language learning, where even apparently straightforward tasks involve several demanding cognitive operations. When listening to a foreign language, for instance, learners must identify sounds, segment the speech stream, recognise words, access their meanings, process grammatical relationships and construct a coherent interpretation, often under considerable time pressure. Reading, speaking and writing place similarly substantial demands on working memory, particularly during the early stages of acquisition, when many of the component processes have yet to become automatic. Consequently, when attention is repeatedly diverted, fewer cognitive resources remain available for these operations, potentially compromising both immediate comprehension and longer-term learning.

We should be careful, however, not to suggest that an entire generation has permanently lost the capacity to concentrate, since the evidence is considerably more nuanced. What we know for sure from cognitive science, though, is that environments characterised by frequent interruptions and rapid task-switching can undermine the conditions required for sustained cognitive processing.

Rather than accommodating fragmented attention indefinitely by making every classroom activity shorter, faster and more stimulating, our pedagogical response should therefore be to create conditions in which attention is deliberately protected and gradually strengthened. This entails:

– reducing unnecessary distractions,

– avoiding excessive multitasking,

– controlling cognitive load and

– designing activities that require sustained but manageable engagement with language.

5. Cognitive overload is often mistaken for lack of effort

One of the most important implications of cognitive science for language teaching is that behaviours we commonly interpret as disengagement, inattention or lack of effort may sometimes be the consequence of excessive cognitive demands rather than insufficient motivation. Consider, for instance, a beginner who is expected to learn unfamiliar vocabulary, manipulate a new grammatical structure, remember word order, monitor agreement and produce a complete sentence simultaneously. Although each of these operations may be manageable in isolation, their combined demands can exceed the learner’s available working-memory resources, resulting in hesitation, avoidance, errors or apparent inattention. In such circumstances, the underlying problem may lie less with the student’s willingness to engage than with the way the learning has been structured.

This is precisely why instructional sequencing matters so much, and why we need to distinguish between productive difficulty, which encourages meaningful cognitive processing, and unnecessary difficulty arising from poorly structured tasks, insufficient modelling or premature demands for independent production (which is one of the most common causes of student failure in secondary school settings in my opinion).

The solution, however, is not to avoid teaching vocabulary and grammar together. On the contrary, presenting grammatical structures through meaningful, carefully selected lexical patterns can support learning by allowing students to process form and meaning in an integrated way. Problems arise when learners are required to handle too many unfamiliar elements simultaneously without sufficient support, particularly when they are expected to produce language independently before the underlying patterns have become sufficiently familiar.

In practical terms, this calls for greater control over the amount of new language introduced, highly comprehensible input, systematic familiarisation with target patterns and extensive receptive processing before learners are expected to produce language independently. Rather than reducing challenge indiscriminately, the objective should be to manage its complexity so that students can devote their limited cognitive resources to the processes most conducive to learning.

6. AI: a shortcut to performance, but not necessarily to learning

Artificial intelligence adds another dimension to this problem, not least because students can now generate sophisticated texts, obtain instant translations, produce apparently fluent answers and complete many language-learning tasks without necessarily engaging in the cognitive processes those tasks were originally designed to elicit. This creates a potentially serious disconnect between observable performance and underlying competence, whereby the quality of the finished product may tell us remarkably little about what the learner can actually do independently.

A student, for example, may submit an accurate paragraph in French without having retrieved a single grammatical structure independently, just as another may produce a polished translation without having processed the original text sufficiently to learn from it. Although the resulting work may be impressive, the crucial question is what, if anything, the learner has actually acquired through producing it.

This is very concerning because retrieval, formulation, error detection and repeated language processing are not merely incidental obstacles that stand between students and a successful outcome; they are often integral components of the learning process itself. When AI consistently performs these operations on students’ behalf, it risks depriving them of precisely those opportunities for cognitive engagement through which independent competence develops.

This does not mean, however, that AI has no legitimate place in language education.Used judiciously, it can generate varied input, create additional retrieval opportunities, support comparison activities and provide material for learners to analyse, critique, correct and improve.

What matters, therefore, is not simply whether AI is being used, but whether its use supports the cognitive processes underpinning acquisition or substitutes for them. In my view, the guiding principle should be straightforward: AI should enrich the learning process, not remove the thinking that makes learning possible.

7. Designing against the grain

If the modern cognitive environment increasingly works against some of the conditions required for language acquisition, we need to reconsider how language curricula are designed and delivered. I believe this calls for slimmer, more coherent, more cumulative and more memory-conscious curricula, particularly given the tendency, historically, to prioritise coverage over depth. Students are frequently exposed to large quantities of vocabulary and numerous grammatical structures without sufficient time being allocated to consolidating them or developing the automaticity required for fluent use, after which we wonder why they struggle to remember what they have been taught or apply it independently.

A more effective approach would begin by prioritising depth over superficial coverage, recognising that a smaller repertoire of high-frequency, useful language which students can retrieve and manipulate confidently is often more valuable than a much larger repertoire that remains fragile and inaccessible.

Equally important is the careful sequencing of progression, whereby learners move gradually from highly supported comprehension towards increasingly independent production, with sufficient processing and rehearsal at each stage. Rather than treating recycling as an occasional revision activity, we should make it a central curriculum design principle, ensuring that previously taught language is revisited cumulatively and systematically through spaced retrieval, interleaving and varied contexts (see the retrieval schedule in the image below for an example of how this can be done).

Alongside these priorities, we need to make success more visible so that students regularly experience evidence of their growing competence, rather than simply completing another topic or worksheet. We should also deliberately cultivate

Conclusion: what needs to change?

We are teaching languages in a world that has changed profoundly, with students whose experiences, expectations and opportunities differ in important ways from those of previous generations. Digital technologies have transformed how information is accessed, how attention is allocated and, increasingly, how tasks are completed, yet the fundamental cognitive mechanisms underpinning human learning have not changed at anything like the same pace.

Attention remains essential, working memory remains limited, repetition and retrieval continue to play a crucial role in acquisition, and fluency still requires extensive practice over time.

Against this backdrop, we should resist the temptation to respond to every emerging challenge by making lessons faster, louder, easier or more entertaining, just as we should avoid romanticising difficulty or assuming that resilience can be developed simply by exposing students to repeated failure.

What is needed instead is instructional design that

1.combines meaningful challenge with appropriate support,

2. protects attention,

3.fosters self-efficacy and

4. makes progress as tangible as possible! .

In other words, rather than responding to learners’ decreasing tolerance of cognitive effort by removing that effort from learning, we should seek to make it more manageable, purposeful, successful and rewarding.

Perhaps the future of language teaching depends less on finding ever more entertaining ways of presenting content than on rediscovering how to help students experience the satisfaction of genuinely mastering something difficult. After all, if meaningful engagement is partly sustained by the experience of growing competence, we may need to reconsider whether our increasingly entertainment-oriented approaches to teaching are always serving our students as well as we imagine.