Exploring AI, Identity, and Language Learning: Chinese Heritage Children in Sweden
A seminar on multilingual pupils’ use of generative AI in language learning and how AI literacy interacts with language identity and motivation in contemporary education. All interested are welcome!
Abstract
Swedish education policy strongly emphasises both digital competence and multilingual development as central educational goals. While pupils are expected to develop critical skills of AI and to strengthen their multilingual repertoires, empirical research at the intersection of generative AI, multilingual education, and immigrant students’ language learning experiences remain scarce. Existing studies on AI in language education largely focus on higher education contexts (Qiao et al., 2025), and little is known about how multilingual pupils understand, evaluate and use AI in relation to their languages.
In this presentation we present findings from a questionnaire on Chinese-speaking pupils in grades 7-9 in Sweden, and examine the relationship between their AI literacy, multilingual identity and language learning motivation across Swedish (societal language), English (international/academic language), and Chinese (heritage language) contexts. Grounded in a repertoire assemblage approach (Ou et al., 2024), the study conceptualises language learning as the development of an integrated communicative repertoire shaped by translanguaging practices and non-human resources (e.g., AI), while acknowledging individual differences in proficiency, affect, and ideologies associated with each named language.
In the next part of our project, we will interview a subsample of these participants on topics relating to language identity and AI usage. We therefore welcome any discussion or comments in this seminar in relation to what we might need to consider before these interviews. Moreover, we eventually hope to produce, on one hand, a larger-scale investigation on the development of appropriate AI-supported pedagogies for multilingual learners, and on the other, contribute to contemporary sociolinguistic debates identity and multilingualism in immigrant educational contexts. We therefore welcome any comments on how to take this project forward in relation to these two potential avenues.