Teaching with Technology in the Post-Pandemic Digital Age: Technological Normalisation and AI-Induced Disruptions

Digital technologies have long been a valuable resource for language teachers to use to support their teaching and student learning (Li, 2017). Despite efforts from educators, scholars and policymakers, however, the full integration of digital technologies into language teaching, or ‘normalisation’, had not been evident in language classrooms in many contexts before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (Moorhouse and Kohnke, 2021). Bax (2003) defined ‘normalisation’ as ‘the stage when a technology is invisible, hardly even recognised as a technology, taken for granted in everyday life’ (p. 23). Following the steps of ‘normalised’ technology integration in other human domains (e.g. banking, travel, medicine, entertainment), this special issue of the RELC Journal examines how digital technologies might be reimagined in the language teaching context in the postpandemic digital age. In 2020, the COVID-19 virus emerged and rapidly spread around the world, leading to the closure of schools and suspension of in-person teaching. Language teachers were generally inexperienced, ill-prepared, and lacked the required digital competence for the demands of using technology for teaching (Stockwell and Wang, 2023). Yet, teachers had to devise, often through a process of experimentation, context-specific technological solutions. This led to rapid technological and pedagogical innovations in response to the