AI-VT: A tool to enhance motivation in English language teaching and learning environments

International audience Over the last two decades, technological advances have deeply altered our societies. The Internet, smart phones, and artificial intelligence have profoundly changed and encouraged more mobile personal and professional lifestyles. Although in 2019 and 2020, the COVID pandemic unexpectedly marked history by bringing many cities and international mobility to an abrupt and highly unexpected stop. This marked a tangible beginning for reflective transformations in our approach to life and work, as well as teaching. As with every major world event, societies were faced at that time with an urgent need to readjust and readapt in many ways and in so many different contexts. Many online environments were quickly created and incorporated to accommodate distance teaching and learning while worldwide, many individuals took the time to reassess the meaning of their lives on a personal and professional basis. All of this took place during uncertain turmoil associated with this highly stressful period. Within the setting of teaching and learning in higher education, social shifts in values and belief systems had an indelible impact on student motivations, curriculum targets, and pedagogical practices. When the threat of the pandemic declined and diminished, many of these environments were then dismantled or readapted, as regular face to face teaching environments were slowly reinstated.Today, many institutions have opted to return to in class teaching while continuing to offer some distance teaching. Some tools that were created during this period continue to assist educators in providing an online or distance dimension, alongside the in-class teaching and learning experience. The Artificial Intelligence Virtual Trainer (AI-VT) is one such tool. AI-VT (Carvalho, Henriet, et al., 2023) is a system that can identify the user's skills from a text by means of machine learning. It employs a case-based reasoning learning support system that can generate customized exercise lists which are individually suited to user needs. As a generic tool, AI-VT was designed to be adapted to any field of learning and it was most recently adapted to the teaching and learning of English. This theory-into-practice presentation presents a transdisciplinary didactic approach for English foreign language teaching and learning in which the AI-VT system acts as an assistant to the language practitioner. It will focus on the methodology and initial results of a two-year study that was conducted with third year university students.