Generative AI has rapidly become part of the language learning landscape. Early discussions in the field have understandably focused on classroom applications, teacher practices, prompt design, materials creation, assessment, plagiarism, and institutional policy. These areas remain important, but they do not fully address a deeper question now facing applied linguistics and second language education: how is generative AI changing the language learner?
The aim of this volume is to examine how sustained interaction with generative AI may reshape second language learners. Rather than treating AI primarily as a teaching tool, the volume focuses on AI as part of the learner’s social, linguistic, cognitive, and emotional environment. It asks how AI-mediated interaction may affect learner identity, affect, agency, participation, belonging, language use, and perceptions of competence and legitimacy.
The rationale for this volume is that many established concepts in second language acquisition and applied linguistics were developed in contexts where learners interacted mainly with teachers, peers, texts, media, and relatively non-agentic technologies. Generative AI complicates these assumptions. It can provide feedback, simulate interaction, model language use, shape learner voice, influence confidence, reduce or intensify anxiety, and participate in meaning-making. These developments invite us to revisit familiar concepts such as the L2 self, investment, willingness to communicate, communities of practice, linguistic norms, learner autonomy, and authenticity.
The scope of the volume is international. Although the project is coordinated through Japan-based editors and publishing networks, the questions it raises are global. Generative AI is affecting learners across diverse educational, linguistic, and cultural contexts. The volume, therefore, welcomes chapters that examine learners in varied settings, especially work that foregrounds under-represented or under-researched contexts.