AI chatbots help you practise a language but won't get you to fluency

They are good for low-stakes practice; research still points learners back to people.

AI chatbots can genuinely help someone practice a new language, but no study shows they alone will carry a learner to fluency. That is the argument Antonio Perez-Nunez, an associate professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston, laid out in The Conversation on 30 September 2026.

The strength, he wrote, is low-stakes practice. A chatbot can run role-play speaking exercises and give immediate feedback. It can hold a conversation that feels less intimidating than talking to a person. In writing, it can correct grammar and refine sentences. It can simplify a story to make listening practice manageable, and it can help a learner work through reading that would otherwise be too difficult.

The ceiling is fluency. Perez-Nunez wrote that research shows chatbots can help learners build language skills, but that there is no evidence using them exclusively achieves fluency. He cited a study of English teachers in Turkey that found some utility in the tools while stressing the importance of connecting with people.

The split is really about what each is for. A chatbot, by his account, is suited to the repetitive, low-stakes work of practice, making mistakes without embarrassment, getting grammar corrected on the spot, rehearsing a conversation before having it for real. Fluency, the part no study credits to chatbots alone, is where the research points learners back toward other people.

He also set out the drawbacks. Chatbots may reproduce cultural stereotypes and biases. They lack the emotional support and lived experience a human teacher or conversation partner provides. And they record users' text and voice data, which Perez-Nunez flagged as a privacy concern.

His recommendation is to keep people at the center. Teachers, he wrote, should guide students to evaluate chatbot responses critically and "explain why they accepted, adapted or rejected its suggestions." Educators themselves, he added, should be trained in what the tools can and cannot do, rather than left to improvise.

Perez-Nunez disclosed that he owns Lingua Innova LLC and developed a chatbot platform for Vista Higher Learning.

Sources

1. Using an AI chatbot to practice new languages can be helpful, but it doesn’t replace speaking with an actual person · The Conversation, Artificial Intelligence