Having given a few teacher training workshops on the topic of AI in ELT, I thought it was about time I shared my thoughts on it here. Is it really the way forward? In the first of a series of blog posts on AI in teaching, let’s take a look at one of the basics – Chat GPT.
Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay so why not make our lives easier and integrate it into our teaching? Chat GPT uses everything available on the internet to create text depending on what we ask for.
The Pros
- It saves you time
- You get an answer instantaneously
- It gives you a direct answer rather than a list of websites
- The basic plan is free to use
- You can easily copy and paste
- It can generate lesson plans, texts, dialogues & activities … at a given level and using language selected by you
- You can source interesting material very easily
- It leaves time for more creativity
- It (mostly) uses natural language
- The premium version now uses up-to-date information
- Materials can be created to suit your students’ interests
The Cons
- It encourages “cheating”
- One query uses 500 ml water and it has a huge carbon footprint (8.4 tonnes Co2 per year)
- The materials it produces still need refinement
- It doesn’t reveal its sources
- The copyright issue is still up in the air – it exploits people’s work without payment or acknowledgement
- It could be misused to spread misinformation bearing in mind the amount of fake news there is out there
- The basic version only uses sources up to 2021 (this will undoubtedly change soon)
- It saves everything you input so you need to be careful with sharing data
- It can start to look a bit “samey” as it averages out everything written
- It hampers creativity
- It seems to struggle with language level. For example, I asked Chat GPT to create a dialogue between a doctor and a patient at beginner level and it had several examples of present perfect continuous in the conversation it produced
The Prompts
The key to getting what you want is fine-tuning your prompts. Here are some tips and tricks I find useful:
- Ask Chat GPT to take on a specific role eg start your prompt with “You are an EFL/ELT/ESL expert”
- Provide a format for it eg write a list/a dialogue/a story
- Be clear and specific – Write a request not a topic and include activity type, learner level, target language … eg You are an ELT expert. Create a 150 word text for intermediate level students on the topic of the environment. Include the following words …
- Don’t give too much information in one prompt. You can always improve what it produces in a second go
- Give it an example
- Don’t use CEF levels, instead write beginner/intermediate etc.
- You may need to refine output a few times
What I have created so far using Chat GPT
- A variety of text types eg dialogue, email, blog post
- Materials for a text Chat GPT has produced eg a gap-fill
- A list of discussion questions on a given topic
- An information gap activity eg two train timetables for students to ask each other about
- A list of lexical items eg collocations on a certain topic as a basis for the lesson
- Poems in a particular style
- A short text with errors in for students to correct
- A simplified version of a more complex text eg a newspaper article
- An explanation of how a certain sound is produced
- A spot-the-difference activity
- A business role play focusing specifically on my learners’ area of interest
- A quiz
- A lesson plan
Why not share your experiences with Chat GPT with us? What have you successfully produced?
The Ultimate Guide to CELTA 