Athmane Boufes

HUMAN–AI CREATIVE SYNERGY IN MULTIMODAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING:

A pedagogically mediated framework for developing communicative competence

Athmane Boufes¹

The rapid proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has transformed the landscape of language education, creating new possibilities for multimodal meaning-making, learner engagement, and communicative practice. Nevertheless, current discussions frequently oscillate between technological enthusiasm and concerns regarding automation, often neglecting the indispensable pedagogical role of the teacher in orchestrating meaningful learning experiences. This paper proposes a pedagogically mediated framework that integrates human and artificial intelligence creative expressions within multimodal English Language Teaching (ELT). Drawing on multimodal pedagogy, sociocultural theory, and contemporary perspectives on human–AI collaboration, the framework conceptualizes artificial intelligence not as a substitute for human agency but as a complementary creative and cognitive resource operating under informed pedagogical mediation. Through the integration of AI-generated textual, visual, auditory, and audiovisual resources into communicative learning tasks, the proposed framework seeks to enhance learners' communicative competence while fostering creativity, critical thinking, interaction, and learner autonomy. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative-prevalent mixed-methods orientation and reports the iterative development of the framework through successive design and refinement phases. Particular attention is devoted to the balance between technological affordances, ethical responsibility, and educational objectives in order to ensure meaningful and responsible AI integration. By advancing a human-centered approach to multimodal language instruction, the study contributes to ongoing debates concerning the pedagogical implications of artificial intelligence and offers a theoretically grounded model for the design of communicative learning environments in the emerging era of human–AI co-creativity.