El Khoury delivered a talk on Teaching the Language AI Gets Wrong: Arabic as a Case Study

Gisele El Khoury, Director of the Language Resource Center, delivered a talk titled "Teaching the Language AI Gets Wrong: Arabic as a Case Study for ELT" at an International Webinar on AI and the Future of English Language Teaching on August 24, 2026. Organized by Seshadripuram Evening College in Bangalore and Bengaluru City University's Platform of English Teachers (BCU POET), the webinar brought together educators worldwide to explore AI's role in language teaching.

Drawing on her legal background as a lawyer and three collaborative research studies on AI and legal translation, and on her current role as an educational specialist and Arabic instructor, Prof. El Khoury revealed where AI translation tools fail: not in basic vocabulary or grammar, but in culturally embedded meanings, Arabic proverbs, legal terminology, and nuances of obligation and permission. Rather than telling teachers to ban these tools or blindly trust them, she proposed a third path: teach students to identify where AI fails and why, then fix it.

Her key insight: fluent-sounding translations can be entirely wrong. Students need to learn to spot that gap. By teaching AI's failures as real curriculum content, educators aren't just adapting to technology; rather, they are building the critical judgment students need to navigate language work in an AI-filled world.