This special issue of English Teaching commemorates the momentous 60th anniversary of the Korea Association of Teachers of English (KATE), reflecting on the evolution of English education and envisioning its future amid rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies. English education in Korea has undergone significant theoretical, pedagogical, and technological transformations, and AI now presents new opportunities and complex challenges for instruction, assessment, equity, and ethics. The articles explore AI integration across all four language skills: reading material generation, career-integrated listening activities, AI feedback in writing, and AIbased speaking systems versus peer activities. A meta-analysis affirms AI’s positive effects on writing instruction. Other contributions examine English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and critically discuss the important ethical challenges of AI adoption, including data privacy, bias, and academic integrity. These studies collectively argue that AI is a powerful tool whose value depends on thoughtful, ethical integration that supports humanistic educational values.

This study aims to investigate the effects of using AI chatbots in Korean English education from a macro perspective. For this purpose, 19 experimental studies are selected to conduct a meta-analysis, synthesizing the results of 51 individual study cases. The results of this study are as follows: First, it is found that the overall effect size of using chatbots is more than medium size meaning that a chatbot is an effective tool to learn English. Second, in the aspects of linguistic competence and affective categories, each shows over medium sizes like the overall effect size. In details of the dependent variables, vocabulary and speaking in linguistic competence and motivation in affective categories, large effect sizes are shown. Third, the effect sizes are getting larger, as the younger the students are, the longer the experiment period lasts, and the more purpose-built the chatbot is. But the differences in the effect sizes in terms of these moderators (e.g., school level, experiment period, and chatbot type) are not significant. Lastly, it is suggested that follow-up studies are needed to collect a sufficient number of experimental study cases and subdivide the variables for performing a more detailed meta-anlysis.