What does a reconfigured language learning ecology look like? My guest today, Professor Pascual Pérez-Paredes, argues that AI-driven environments can “expand opportunities for language learning while creating risks related to opacity and over-reliance”.

We discuss the continued importance of studying real, attested language use through well-designed corpora, enabling evidence-based comparisons and supporting traceable, reproducible research. This, Pérez-Paredes claims, is more important than ever when unreliable, non-evidenced answers from chat bots are just a mouse click away.

We also discuss corpora in teaching, how AI can make corpus tools more user friendly, costs and local models, and the need for critical AI literacy, open-box pedagogies, and transparency amid increasing synthetic language.

Pérez-Paredes, P., Curry, N. and Aguado Jiménez, P. (2025) 'Integrating critical corpus and AI literacies in applied linguistics: a mixed-methods study', Computer Assisted Language Learning, pp. 1–27. doi: 10.1080/09588221.2025.2569351.

Pérez-Paredes, P. (2026) 'Corpus linguistics and AI in the reconfiguration of language learning ecologies', Language Teaching, pp. 1–13. doi: 10.1017/S0261444825101109

Pascual Pérez-Paredes is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Universidad de Murcia, and former Lecturer in Research in Second Language Education at the University of Cambridge. His main research interests are the use of corpus linguistics methods in applied linguistics, corpora and digital resources in language education, learner language variation, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. He was the Overall Coordinator of the MEd Research Methods Strand at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge (2016-2019).

His most recent books are Corpus Linguistics for Language Learning Research, John Benjamins Research Methods in Applied Linguistics series with co-authors Geraldine Mark & Anne O’Keeffe; Data-driven Learning in and out of the Language Classroom, Cambridge University Press, co-authored with Prof Alex Boulton and //Corpus Linguistics for education. A guide for research// in the Routledge Corpus Linguistics series.

He is currently PI of the ERASMUS+ project “Freedom of movement at play: EU citizens’ identity and transnational discourses” (2023-2025) funded by the European Commission and PI in the Spanish Research Agency -funded project Broadening the scope of Data-driven learning: a multi-site & multi-data approach.

Twitter @perezparedes and Bluesky @perez-paredes.bsky.social

Google Scholar Profile Research Gate Profile

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2796-338X

SCOPUS: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=26038713600#

WOS: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/G-6496-2011