ChatGPT in Modern Language  Teaching

Since the pandemic, I have been regularly looking into digital tools and how they can fit into my classes. In November 2022, education was hit by a small 'earthquake', when OpenAi released the newest version of their 'chat bot' - ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an interactive language model that was trained by parsing billions of text documents available on the internet. When given a basic prompt, ChatGPT can produce answers that resemble human interaction. It can hold a conversation in many languages, it can translate, it can write essays, haikus, or even snippets of code. It can correct text, it can rewrite it in any number of different styles, and it can even evaluate text according to target criteria. While chat bots have been around for a long time, the newest version of ChatGPT is the first to be sophisticated enough to pass as a human being as long as it's not challenged with logic or asked about niche topics.

Suffice to say, this is a game changer, including for modern languages education. Students can create homework in seconds, and have already been caught doing so. We will have to be prepared to deal with this, and I'm sure a lot will be written about this in the coming months, so stay tuned.

What I would like to focus on in my first blog post on the topic instead is the more positive question about how Chat-GPT can help me be a more productive teacher. Over the Christmas break I've had some time to delve into Chat-GPT's vast possibilities. The two topics I would like to highlight are:

• Creating content for my students
• Proofreading text and providing feedback

Let's start with content creation. Creating new content is time-consuming plus I am not feeling particularly creative when it's peak marking season. As I follow the Conti MARS EARS cycle, I have asked ChatGPT to create a range of tasks based on a particular sentence builder. (If this is your first time reading about ChatGPT: these screenshots show my prompt at the top and the ChatGPT response at the bottom) 

a) Gap-filling exercises

This example shows you how flexible and powerful ChatGPT can be: it knows what a gap fill exercise is, and it produces an exercise with the solutions at the bottom. Perhaps you are not too impressed yet since I provided the full text as a starting point. So let's try something else:

b) (Un)jumbling sentences:

Simple and effective. Now let's try and create new text rather than modifying examples. 

c) Creating exemplars for Directed Writing tasks (or any other text students need to produce using specific prompts)

Nice text. In a DW task, students might have been asked to include certain elements. So let's ask ChatGPT if those elements are in the text, and if not, to update the text and include them:

d) Narrow reading tasks

This text was taken from a 2022 SQA Paper [PDF]:

e) Create grammar explanations

I only ever teach grammar explicitly once students have processed the chunks of language, they need to process the grammar content I want to focus on. 

Admittedly, for this simple example the answer could have been taken from Wikipedia or other sources directly. I'll explore this further to see how far it can go. It gets a bit more interesting when it comes to creating exercises for the grammar explanation:

As you can see, there are lots of possibilities here to save time and create new content, despite this not even scratching the surface. 

The second topic I would like to explore is how to use ChatGPT to proofread text and to generate feedback. This is to some extent an ethical powder keg, clearly a computer programme should not be used as a stand-in for evaluation by us teachers. ChatGPT is not intelligent, completely unaware of the classroom teaching context and can't provide any genuine insight. Nevertheless, when used with caution, I think there are some possibilities that could help us do our job. 

I have also asked the app to give feedback on a text to see if I would agree with it. Obviously, as teachers we are the professionals and those who know and share what students can improve in a text. However, I think sometimes it is worth getting a second "opinion", especially one that is impartial. This could be useful especially for those of us who teach non-native foreign languages - the app might help to detect subtle mistakes or suggest improvements we might otherwise not have spotted.

A note of warning. As good as it is, ChatGPT is not perfect, and its output needs to be checked carefully before it can be used in a professional setting. Results for certain tasks are not always consistent, so it might take a while to produce the desired outcome. There are also some fundamental limitations that prevent me from doing things that could be useful for sentence builders. For example, the structure of its programming currently prevents ChatGPT from being able to construct sentences from a specified number of words or phrases—try asking it for a three-word joke to see for yourself.

This however is only the beginning of an amazing new journey. The next version of the underlying natural language processing model, GPT-4, will be released in a few months from now, and according to early reviews, it will provide another huge improvement to ChatGPT. In parallel, many other developers are working on language processing models that so far have received less media attention. For now, these are early-stage releases that are being actively improved by user feedback. You sign up with a free personal account that allows you to trial ideas like the above, but it's not super user friendly, and sometimes the servers are overwhelmed with too many user requests. However, it won't be long before we will see the emergence of third-party apps built upon OpenAI's GPT technology, including for language learning. The sheer number of possibilities on offer is both exciting and a little bit scary. We should do our best to be prepared for it.

For further reading, see also the posts by Steve Smith and I'm sure there are many others.