1　Introduction

The profound adjustment of talent cultivation goals in foreign language education in the new era has shifted from instrumental language skills training to cultivating compound talents with patriotic sentiments, global vision, and professional competence. Digital-intelligent empowerment has become a critical pathway to achieving this transformation, yet it presents multiple challenges for foreign language teachers: the substitution effect of artificial intelligence on language skills teaching weakens teachers' professional identity; insufficient digital-intelligent literacy makes it difficult for teachers to guide AI in generating higher-order teaching content; the Western narrative bias of mainstream large language models imposes new requirements on teachers' value discernment capabilities; and the university evaluation system that emphasizes traditional indicators fails to incentivize teachers' investment in digital transformation. Based on this, the study takes BFSU's reform practice as a sample to explore feasible pathways for promoting foreign language teacher development through institutional innovation.

2　Realistic Drivers of Digital-Intelligent Empowerment for Foreign Language Teacher Development

This section discusses the dual dynamic mechanism of foreign language teacher development in the digital-intelligent era. External traction is manifested in the context of building a strong education nation and the Global Civilization Initiative, where educational digitalization has risen to a national strategy, generative artificial intelligence has reshaped the production mode of linguistic knowledge, and foreign language education has been endowed with the strategic mission of international communication and mutual learning among civilizations, requiring teachers to possess both intelligent tool application capabilities and value guidance responsibilities. Internal drive stems from disciplinary structural transformation: research objects have shifted toward digital humanities and multimodal linguistic data, talent cultivation positioning has been upgraded to compound competence cultivation, while the existing teacher competence structure is mismatched with these demands—empirical research shows that foreign language teachers' digital competence is generally moderate, with obvious shortcomings in digital teaching evaluation, and a reverse relationship with teaching experience, with western regions significantly lagging behind eastern regions; BFSU practice also reveals the coexistence of senior teachers' pressure in technology adaptation and young teachers' insufficient experience in pedagogical integration, urgently requiring the construction of tiered training and collaborative mechanisms.

3　Four-in-One Collaborative Mechanism: Practical Pathway for Digital-Intelligent Empowerment of Foreign Language Teacher Development

Taking Beijing Foreign Studies University as an example, this section elaborates the practical pathway of "Four-in-One Collaborative Mechanism" for digital-intelligent empowerment of foreign language teacher development. In the dimension of value guidance, the university established the concept of "technology empowerment, education-oriented" through the Artificial Intelligence Construction Plan (2025–2027), guiding teachers to recognize that digital-intelligent transformation is an inevitable requirement for disciplinary evolution and to assume the roles of learning facilitator and human-machine collaborative organizer. In the dimension of platform support, 289 smart classrooms were built, a digital resource ecosystem was constructed, and intelligent assessment and AI teaching assistant systems were introduced, achieving teaching digitalization and visualization, and being selected as a typical case by the Ministry of Education. In the dimension of training empowerment, a tiered and categorized training system integrating research and training was established, helping teachers grow from "technology novices" to innovative teachers through workshops, virtual teaching and research offices, and teaching competitions. In the dimension of evaluation-driven development, digital portraits of teacher development were constructed based on big data, digital literacy was incorporated into assessment and evaluation, and incentive measures such as Smart Teaching Pacesetters were established, promoting the transformation of teacher development from "being asked to change" to "wanting to change." The four dimensions support and advance each other cyclically, forming a systematic pathway covering concept renewal, environment construction, competence enhancement, and incentive guarantee.

4　Three-Stage Leap: Phased Achievements of Digital-Intelligent Empowerment Reform

Beijing Foreign Studies University's digital-intelligent empowerment reform has simultaneously demonstrated phased achievements at three levels: teaching, research, and social service. At the teaching level, through AI-empowered tiered training, teachers' roles have shifted from language knowledge transmitters to learning process organizers and human-machine collaborative designers; Rain Classroom, large language models, and intelligent assessment tools have achieved normalized application; the "Waixiaotong" intelligent service platform has cumulatively served nearly ten thousand teachers and students; 18 cross-college smart courses have been approved for construction; digital-intelligent integrated instructional design won the first prize in the Beijing University Teachers' Teaching Innovation Competition; digital-intelligent teaching scenarios such as remote consecutive interpreting training rooms have been successively established, initially forming a human-machine collaborative teaching organization mode. At the research level, relying on the "Artificial Intelligence and Human Languages Key Laboratory," nearly 800 teachers have participated in corpus construction and annotation for 101 languages, promoting teachers' transformation from text interpretation to digital humanities research, producing multiple representative academic works, with digital humanities literacy becoming a core competence for foreign language teachers. At the social service and international influence level, the university took the lead in releasing industry reports such as the Global National Translation Capacity Index, was selected into the Ministry of Education's Philosophy and Social Sciences Innovation Team, the UMOOCs platform covers 600+ courses in 18 languages and radiates to 400+ universities nationwide, hosted international conferences on language intelligent teaching, founded the international journal *Journal of China Computer-Assisted Language Learning*, the reform experience was selected as a typical case at the World Digital Education Conference, and jointly initiated the SCO National Digital Education Alliance, achieving expansion from internal reform to external radiation.

5　Conclusion

This section elaborates that against the background of foreign language education transformation in the digital-intelligent era, BFSU has promoted teachers' transformation from language skills trainers to compound educators integrating technology and humanities through constructing a "value guidance—platform support—training empowerment—evaluation-driven" four-in-one closed-loop pathway, emphasizing that technology aims to liberate teachers rather than diminish human roles, while also pointing out challenges such as preventing students' over-reliance on AI and adhering to data ethics boundaries, calling for maintaining educational resolve to explore more universally applicable development pathways.