A brief concluding remark: technology, pedagogy, and the society that makes them

In the conclusion we argue that just like every major shift in language teaching has reflected its historical moment and its definition of what it means to “know” a language, teachers have remained indispensable—evolving from textual experts to drill supervisors, designers of communicative tasks, and now mediators of platforms, equity, and even emotional support. Our argument is that AI and LLMs, as products of an always-on culture, risk turning competence into what can be generated and tracked on demand and very swiftly replacing community with commodity unless they are critically mediated. We therefore insist that institutions must ensure technology serves pedagogy and that the real response to AI’s invasion of education is education itself—especially emotional and humanistic education—with teachers as designers of meaningful social tasks and, therefore, custodians of community.