Artificial Intelligence, Real Teaching: A Guide to AI in ELT (Book Review)

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is often portrayed as the next emerging technology that is about to revolutionize education. There is even a current book titled, “Brave new words: How AI will revolutionize education (and why that’s a good thing)” (Khan, 2024), authored by the founder of Khan Academy, an educational platform that has a global user base of more than 137 million registered users across 190 countries. Similar claims of educational innovations have historically emerged with each new technology, whether radio, television, or social media platforms, or, at present, with GenAI (Pegrum, 2025). When a revolutionary new educational tool is introduced, the older system becomes reframed as “traditional” (despite having once been a revolutionary innovation itself), and the pros vs. cons of the new system are weighed against it. Since GenAI’s emergence within academic spheres, peer-reviewed journal articles and books dedicated to exploring GenAI’s educational and societal impact have been widely discussed by the academic community. Unlike other book titles on GenAI (e.g., Bowen & Watson, 2024; Khan, 2024), the book under review titled Artificial intelligence, real teaching: A guide to AI in ELT, is a guide for using AI for foreign language instruction, particularly for those who teach English as an additional language. The book authors, Joshua Paiz, Rachel Toncelli, and Ilka Kostka claim that they co-authored this book to “build a robust foundation for English language teachers seeking to understand the nuances of AI, both in terms of risks and rewards, as well as strategies for meaning and ethical integration into professional practice” (p. 76). The entire book is filled with real-world scenarios drawn from their everyday teaching experiences. [First paragraph of review]