Macarena Tejada López is a lecturer of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies. She can be contacted at mt639@cornell.edu.
I write in response to the article “A Look into AI In The Classroom: Cornell Professors Introduce AI Platforms to Manage Coursework, Class Organization” published on March 6. The piece reports on AI use in classrooms and includes interviews with multiple people who are generally enthusiastic about its integration. However, the reporting on SPAN 2090: “Intermediate Spanish I (Composition and Conversation),” based on a single student’s experience, does not provide a full picture for why ChitterChatter, a virtual language partner, is in the syllabus. As the coordinator and lecturer of SPAN 2090, I seek to fill in some gaps.
I included ChitterChatter in SPAN 2090’s syllabus for this spring, following a demonstration of the software I observed at the end of the Fall 2025 semester. Speaking is a challenging skill to master in a foreign language, and students don’t always get all the practice they need in the classroom, a problem recently exacerbated by a 25% rise in the student cap from 16 to 20. Language learning benefits from small class sizes. Being a little skeptical of AI myself, I made ChitterChatter fully optional with the incentive of improving the grade of the two oral exams. Despite this incentive, the nine sections of the course show consistently low levels of engagement with the AI program. Roughly one student per section has maintained weekly practice since the start of the course. Students’ interest spiked right before the first exam which coincided with the deadline to access the extra credit, and has since plummeted.
In the article, Elly Budliger ’29 addressed ethical reservations regarding AI, in accordance with other students. In fact, some of my students outright rejected ChitterChatter — they prefer human conversations. Indeed, learning a language is a social experience enhanced by human interaction. In my class, students have the option to benefit from the extra credit incentive by practicing with me during office hours. The same opportunity is extended to all students in SPAN 2090.
Therefore, given the strong students’ disinterest, AI will be replaced by instructor-led conversation circles to supplement oral practice in Spanish.
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