2026 ECS Annual Lecture

ECS welcomes Dr Niall Curry from Manchester Metropolitan University for the 2026 Annual Lecture.

GenAI in Education: The Case of Personalisation

Following the Generative AI (GenAI) boom, in 2022, GenAI has become a critical subject of inquiry across the academy. In the context of education, researchers have posited that GenAI may be able to democratise education, afford greater autonomy to teachers and learners, and bring about a revolution in research and practice. Yet, concerns have also emerged – concerns surrounding the black box nature of GenAI tools, learners’ growing dependency on GenAI tools, and the centrality of product, rather than process, in the use of GenAI tools. A central argument that supports the use of GenAI in education is its lauded capacity for personalising learning. However, this is a complex proposition that merits unpacking.

To this end, in this lecture, I centre on this notion of personalisation. I trace its development over time, and I address it as a complex, theoretical concept applied across different domains of education. I then turn to the GenAI literature and wider representations of GenAI tools in education to determine the degree to which academic understandings of personalisation and the kinds of personalisation made possible by GenAI tools align. Through this comparison, I chart a way forward for education research concerned with the use of GenAI as a pedagogical resource.

Meet the speaker

Dr Niall Curry is a UKRI Metascience AI Fellow and Reader in Languages and Linguistics at the School of English, at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work addresses issues in applied linguistics, with specific interest in corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis, and language pedagogy.

His most recent work addresses the use of Artificial Intelligence in applied linguistics, climate discourses across languages and cultures, corpus linguistics for materials development, and studies of public-oriented research communication. He is Series Co-Editor of the Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics and Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides book series, Section Editor of Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts.

For more information about Niall, his publications, and his projects, visit: https://linktr.ee/niallrcurry