Research perspectives and trends in Artificial Intelligence-enhanced language education: A review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had a significant impact on language education, arousing the related studies from different fields and perspectives. However, the extant review articles only focused on a certain aspect in the field, thus neglecting the multi-disciplinary and multi-perspective features of AI-enhanced language education. The aim of the current study is to bridge this gap by reviewing the 812 articles selected from Web of Science via CiteSpace. The study found that the existing studies were mainly conducted from the perspectives of computer science, linguistics and psychology. Besides, the individualized development of language education supported by technology was not obvious, and the degree of human-computer interaction was weak. Moreover, previous studies focused more on the advantages of AI-enhanced language education than the disadvantages, and the empirical research to analyze specific problems was insufficient. In the future, the research tends to strengthen the cooperation among related disciplines and focus on the individualized development of language education. In addition, empirical research should be strengthened to explore the efficiency of AI-enhanced language education in order to promote the reform of language education.