PedAIgogy: Teaching Chinese Language, Literature & Culture in the Age of AI

Hongyin Tao

UCLA

In the social sciences and humanities, qualitative and quantitative approaches are often viewed as fundamentally distinct, if not opposing. For example, in linguistic research, corpus linguistics is explicitly oriented toward the analysis of large datasets, whereas conversation analysis prioritizes micro-level, single-case investigations. Proponents of each approach rigorously defend their methodologies, and for good reason. However, reconciling these paradigms presents significant challenges, given their underlying epistemological principles and the technological barriers that complicate integration.

In this talk, I demonstrate how AI tools can serve as a bridge between these methodological divides. Specifically, I illustrate how technologies such as video data processing, speech-to-text conversion, machine translation, and visualization software can facilitate detailed qualitative analysis of video-based multimodal data while simultaneously enabling large-scale investigation. This integrated approach has the potential to yield insights that might not otherwise be accessible.

Furthermore, from an instructional technology perspective, incorporating AI-assisted multimodal analysis into teaching can provide students with novel ways to engage with and master subject matter, enhancing both their analytical skills and their understanding of complex phenomena.

About the Speaker

Hongyin Tao is a professor of Chinese language and linguistics at UCLA. He also holds an honorary Distinguished Chair Professor position at the National Taiwan Normal University and was the 2014 president of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA. His research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and interactional aspects of Chinese language use in context. Among his over 160 publications are Units in Mandarin Conversation: Prosody, Discourse, and Grammar (John Benjamins 1996), Global Chinese Variation - USA (Commercial Press 2022), and Learner Corpora Construction and Explorations in Chinese and Related Languages (Springer 2023).

AI and Course Design: A Case Study

Gladys Mac
Loyola Marymount University

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now an integral part of education as it is embedded in many programs and apps we use. This talk explores how AI can assist with curriculum development, especially in the early stages of developing a new course. AI can generate a complete syllabus for any topic within seconds, providing a schedule, sources, assignment breakdowns, and suggested assignments, quizzes, or exam prompts. Courses that fulfil specific university requirements can be inputted as part of the prompt to adapt to different class sizes and difficulties. I will use my East Asian Science Fiction class as a case study. This course aims to fulfil the interdisciplinary requirement at Loyola Marymount University. I will also address the limitations of AI in course design, specifically AI’s frequent hallucinations and reliance on landmark works that may now be outdated research.

AI Tools to Customize Reading Materials for Advanced Chinese Courses

Yanshuo Zhang
Pomona College

As students transition from intermediate to advanced-level Chinese language proficiency, the question of how to introduce authentic materials with appropriate challenging levels is key to maintaining student interest and facilitating their learning. Informed use of AI tools can help students access authentic materials with key learning strategies. This presentation explores different AI tools for adjusting and annotating advanced-level Chinese reading materials. It presents different ways instructors can experiment with AI tools with linguistic and cultural consciousness.

Zen in the Machine — Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Learning in AI-Embedded Travel Courses

Hongwei Lu
University of Redlands

This presentation is about using AI in a travel course on Zen-inspired gardens, and integrates studies of art and history, poetry and calligraphy, horticulture and botany, architecture and landscape design, cultural heritage and practices, aesthetics and philosophy, environmental studies, and spirituality. Travel courses provide students with the best cultural immersion experiences and allow students to study the dynamic interactions between cultures through cross-cultural comparisons and intercultural analysis. The use of AI in a travel course can greatly enhance the learning experience with expanded possibilities and new tools. AI can be embedded into every phase of the travel course. Students can use AI to integrate historical and social contexts with onsite learning. Students can also access and analyze vast amounts of data from their chosen disciplines or through an interdisciplinary lens, identifying connections and patterns. Students can analyze real time data and integrate them with onsite learning. AI promotes interdisciplinary studies by bridging gaps between different fields, enhancing collaboration, and providing new tools for research and analysis. Students can also create multimedia narratives with AI design tools to combine photos, interviews, and research. Furthermore, on-site learning can help students recognize AI biases in cultural and historical interpretations. The integration of AI with travel course learning will better prepare students for a future where intercultural studies, digital interconnectedness, and interdisciplinary thinking are inseparable.

Enhancing L2 Teaching with AI-Powered Visual Tools

Shuyi Wang
Pomona College

AI-powered websites can support educators in creating lesson materials while also allowing students to enhance their writing skills by generating images based on their own descriptions. AI-generated image platforms such as Doubao.com provide L2 instructors with innovative tools to enhance classroom engagement. By using AI-generated images, instructors can create customized images for vocabulary exercises, storytelling, and interactive discussions. Additionally, students can use these platforms to practice Chinese in a creative and immersive way. For beginner-level students, AI can generate scenes such as a furnished room for descriptive activities or produce flashcards to aid language acquisition. At the advanced level, students can give AI specific instructions to generate culturally relevant images, such as describing traditional Chinese architecture and instructing AI to create an image based on their vision. These tools offer practical applications for integrating AI-generated visuals into lesson planning, making language learning more dynamic, interactive, and visually stimulating.

AI Tools for Teaching Advanced Chinese Culture Couse

Jack Liu
California State University, Fullerton

The study explores the use of new AI tools at CSUF, specifically TitanGPT and Google's NotebookLM, in an upper-division course on Chinese culture, "Silk Roads and Ancient Globalization." It emphasizes how NotebookLM aids faculty by enabling learners to create specialized notebooks with materials in both English and Chinese, such as journal articles and lecture notes. Students can use NotebookLM as a tool to query information, generate summaries, and create podcasts from PDFs. The study also examines how these AI tools can improve student research skills and cultural learning, along with students’perspectives on AI tools.

Utilizing AI-Powered Tools as Supplementary Resources for L2 Chinese Learners

Jun Lang and Ernesto Gutierrez Topete
Pomona College

This presentation explores recent pedagogical approaches to integrating AI-supported tools as supplementary resources for L2 Chinese learners. Our goal is to examine whether specific AI tools can improve pronunciation at the elementary level and enhance pragmatic competence at the advanced level. Beginner students used an AI-powered app for pronunciation practice, while advanced learners engaged in communicative speech acts on an AI-supported platform. Both tools provided corrective feedback. We will discuss implementation steps, students’ self-reported experiences, and preliminary findings on the effectiveness of AI-assisted learning at the two proficiency levels.

Michael Berry

UCLA

Michael Berry is an author and translator who is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has written and edited ten books on Chinese literature and cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2022) The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan (2022) and Translation, Disinformation and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Trans Pacific Disinformation Campaign (2022). A Guggenheim Fellow (2023) and a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow (2008, 2021), Berry has received Honorable Mentions for the MLA Louis Roth Translation Prize (2009) and the Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize (2020). He has served as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong). Berry's book-length translations include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2008) by Wang Anyi, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, To Live (2004) by Yu Hua, a selection in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read library, and three books by Fang Fang, including the controversial Wuhan Diary (2020). His latest translation project is the dystopian science fiction Hospital Trilogy by Han Song, which includes the novels Hospital (2023), Exorcism (2023) and Dead Souls (2024).

Keynote Title

Three Years in the Sick Ward: AI Nightmares, Textual Variants, Shifting Points of View, the Doomsday Countdown and Other Strange Tales of Translation from Han Song’s Hospital Trilogy

Keynote Abstract

Han Song’s “Hospital Trilogy” is a experimental science fiction series originally published between 2016-2018 that describes Yang Wei’s attempt to navigate a strange dystopian environment in which everyone is sick and the entire universe is a massive hospital. Running the hospital is an AI algorithm named Siming, which eventually goes haywire and begins contemplating suicide. This presentation will discuss the translation process of the “Hospital Trilogy,” which in many ways was just as strange as the novel itself, touching on AI nightmares, textual variants, shifting points of views, and even a doomsday countdown.

The Power of Personal Touch: Augmenting AI with Human Interactive Components

Meimei Zhang
Occidental College

The integration of artificial intelligence into language education presents exciting possibilities, but true engagement in learning Chinese language and literature requires the irreplaceable human element. This presentation explores a balanced approach that combines AI-driven tools with hands-on, interactive student activities. While students leverage technology for projects such as video dubbing, animation creation, and AI-assisted storytelling, they are also encouraged to engage in technology-free skits, collaboratively designing scripts, using their own voices, and performing in groups. By blending AI’s efficiency with student-driven creativity and peer collaboration, this approach fosters deeper linguistic and literary appreciation. Through case studies and classroom applications, this discussion highlights how educators can use AI not as a substitute for human interaction but as a tool to enhance active learning, ensuring that students remain at the center of the creative and communicative process.

On the Road to the Tower of Babel: Navigating Creative Writing and Self-Translation in the Age of AI

Wendy Sun
Grinnell College

This talk will contribute to the broader conversation on AI in pedagogy by examining how technology challenges and assists, rather than replaces, our understanding of literature’s human core.`As a creative writer, translator, and educator, I have been designing and teaching a combined creative writing and translation lecture and workshop, exploring the intersections between literary expression, self-translation, and artificial intelligence. One particularly revealing experiment involved revisiting a short story I originally wrote in 2011, when my English fluency was less polished, and using AI to enhance its eloquence while keeping every detail intact. When workshopped with students at both Grinnell College and Harvard University, the original human-written version evoked significantly stronger emotional responses—one Harvard student was even moved to tears—while the AI-refined text, despite its linguistic polish, failed to achieve the same effect.

This experiment raises important questions about AI’s role in literature and pedagogy: What is lost when AI smooths out human expression? Can technology replicate the raw emotions embedded in writing? And how should we guide students in engaging critically with AI as both a creative and translational tool?

The Devil in the Details: Experiential and Collaborative Learning in the Age of AI

Hangping Xu
University of California, Sant Barbara

The availability of AI tools such as ChatGPT or, more recently, DeepSeek has forced us to think harder about the nature of learning: When does learning take place, and how do we facilitate it? Students can submit an AI-generated essay that pretends a high level of interpretive, analytical, conceptual, and argumentative sophistication. I suggest that AI-generated writings often operate on a high level of generality and vagueness. To counter that robotic vagueness, students should be guided to be concrete in their thinking and presentation of ideas; I propose a pedagogy that aims to catch “the devil in the details.” The details are best found in experiential and collaborative learning. I will use my Chinese cinema course as a case in point, where I use the notion of aesthetics to anchor experiential learning because the nature of aesthetics precisely emphasizes embodiment, senses, affect, and, in short, experience. Students explore the various theories of aesthetics throughout the course. This inquiry culminates in a final group project where students take a walk together on campus and document a moment where they felt a strong aesthetic experience. Each group puts together a short video that curates details from their group walk to render their aesthetic experience; they also co-author a personal mini-essay where they reflect on the collective aesthetic experience and articulate a working definition of aesthetics, drawing upon course materials. I will conclude by discussing the personal essay as a unique genre to foster experiential learning.

AI to Empower, Not Overpower: Teaching Beyond ChatGPT

Feng Xiao
Pomona College

The year 2024 saw a significant rise in AI-supported pedagogy and instructional research, setting the stage for an even more vibrant 2025 for AI-augmented transformation. With rapid advancements in AI models, institutional adoption, and educational practices, we are on the cusp of transforming from individual-level prompt-based experiments to domain-specific models that can optimize workflows, address individual differences, and tackle challenges like academic integrity. This closing talk will explore the current landscape of AI in higher education, highlight emerging best practices, and offer strategic recommendations on policies and technologies to make the transformation to “Pedaigogy” tangible and effective.