The Deskilling of Language Teachers via Surveillance and Automation: A Critical Narrative Review

As a language teacher in post-secondary settings, I have noticed the increased gigification and automation of my work through precarious employment and delivery of pre-curated course modules. This made me question the uncritical adoption of technology within my field, which has come at the expense of teacher and student privacy. The commodification of language teaching has led to the packaging of courses, activities, services and promises in educational technologies in the form of apps, hardware, software, and innumerable websites marketed to students, teachers, and institutions. Although many edtech tools have facilitated language teaching, they have come with risks to our privacy, freedoms, and jobs. Many edtech tools collect information about us, breaching our privacy and surveilling how we interact in digital spaces. Drawing on literature from the education and other disciplines, I attempt to explain one potentially overlooked impact of edtech on language teaching. From a critical applied linguistics lens, this diminishes our control over our labour. Whoever has access to this information yields power over our labour where our digital interactions with our students are reduced to clicks and metrics, deprived of human interaction as we relinquish control over our labour. Information collected by edtech can also be used to automate aspects of teaching, deskill our profession, and reduce our agency. Thus, possibly contributing to the precarious employment landscape marring the field of English language teaching. This paper calls for a more critical evaluation of edtech in language education. This is also a call for more transparent practices in how edtech uses the information it collects about us, through policy changes and improved digital literacy in our field.