Episode 2: AI and Multilingual Learners
A Conversation with Mary Ehrenworth & Philip Seyfried
Mary Ehrenworth and Philip Seyfried, co-authors of AI-Supported Teaching for Multilingual Learners, explore the possibilities AI offers multilingual learners and their teachers. We talk about using AI to bridge language differences, better recognize what students know and can do, and expand access without losing the human connections that matter.
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Meet Our Guests
Mary Ehrenworth Mary is an internationally recognized literacy educator, author, and longtime leader at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. She has written over 30 books, including Pathways to the Common Core and Tackling Complex Texts. With Philip, she explores how AI can support literacy teaching.
LINK to her Website
Philip Seyfried Philip is an educator and technology specialist focused on literacy, teaching, and emerging tech. He is a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, and works as a Staff Developer and AI/EdTech Specialist with The Reading and Writing Project at Mossflower.
LINK to his Website
Their Work Together:
AI-Supported Teaching for Multilingual Learners: A Multimodal Approach to Literacies Agustín Reyes-Torres, Philip Seyfried & Mary Ehrenworth | Teachers College Press, 2026
Mary and Philip wrote this book with their colleague Agustín Reyes-Torres. It explores how AI can support multilingual learners and the teachers who work with them, using classroom stories, practical frameworks, and adaptable ideas that treat students’ languages and cultures as strengths. Much of this conversation draws on the research behind it.
AI and Reading Instruction: Digital Partners for Deepening Comprehension and Discussion in K–12 Classrooms Mary Ehrenworth & Philip Seyfried | Routledge, 2026
Focused specifically on reading, this book explores ways AI can deepen comprehension, discussion, critical thinking, and access. It includes classroom examples, teacher-created tools, AI-student conversations, and practical approaches teachers can adapt across grade levels.
AI-Enhanced Literacies
Mary and Philip's shared website extends the work of their books with resources, ideas, and ongoing thinking about AI and literacy instruction.
Main Points from the Conversation -
AI can show teachers what multilingual students already know and can do.
Philip explains that AI knows the languages students bring to class, so a teacher who doesn’t speak Ukrainian can still study a student’s Ukrainian writing to see what they can do as a writer, and can tell whether the need is more English or a writing skill to teach. Mary adds that multilingual learners’ strengths are often missed, and that discovering a strong argument writer who is simply not yet writing in English can be an epiphany for teachers.
AI can help teachers build relationships with families who speak other languages.
Mary connects this to Zaretta Hammond’s rapport tallies, which reveal the families we tend to talk with most. She and Philip use an AI partner to draft a note about what each student is doing well, translate it into the family’s first language, and tell families that AI helped. One parent of a fifth grader whose first language is Ukrainian wrote back that it was the first note home about something their child had done in seven years.
Students need to learn how to tell AI what not to change.
Mary shares the story of international-school students whose papers were flagged by AI detectors after they asked for translation help. They had done the research and writing themselves, but no one had taught them to ask for a translation that keeps the content and doesn’t raise the level of their language. Teaching that kind of prompt is part of teaching students to use AI well.
AI can help us question our own curriculum.
Philip describes prompts teachers can use with a reading list: whose voices are centered and whose are missing, what cultural assumptions assignments make about students’ home lives, and how a text might be experienced by students from different backgrounds. Mary adds that an AI partner can ask questions a colleague might not, such as why a particular novel was chosen first for a group of students.
Before you close the laptop, decide what you will carry forward.
Philip suggests a habit for teachers and students: after AI offers ideas, ask what you can adopt into your own thinking so you are ready the next time you face the challenge. The goal is for AI to give us nudges while we become the people who have the answers.
Resources & References
Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond Mary mentions Hammond’s “rapport tallies,” a list you make in the first weeks of school of which students and families you actually know and talk with, and who you might be missing.
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Beyond the Episode
Episode 1: AI in the Classroom Mary and Philip on what AI actually does, why students need to become trainers rather than passive users, and why the most powerful approach may be brain first, not brain only.
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