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I’ve shared a number of ways that I and others have been using Artificial Intelligence with English Language Learners at THE BEST POSTS ABOUT USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH ELLS.

Here’s another idea I’d like to try out.  Though I’m not teaching summer school this year, my student teacher is, and I’m going to ask her to have students give it a shot.

My idea is to have students use ChatGPT to engage in a dialogue related to the theme we are studying.

So, for example, if we are studying school vocabulary, they would copy-and-paste this prompt (the same prompt could be used for any topic and just switch out, in this case, being at school with another scenario:

You will pretend to be a teacher at school.  I will pretend to be your student. We will pretend to have a conversation.  I will say something first, then you will respond. You are a teacher. I am a student. Let’s have a conversation. I will say one sentence. Then you will say one sentence. You are not to invent an entire conversation. You will only respond to what I say.  I am a Beginning English Language Learner, so please keep your answers short.  After I tell you the conversation is over, please retype the entire dialogue and explain in Spanish any errors that I made. I will begin now.  Teacher, can I can go to the bathroom?

Then, after several lines of conversation, they would paste this into ChatGPT:

The conversation is over, please retype the entire dialogue in English and explain in Spanish any errors that I made.

 

It took me a few tries to phrase a prompt to get it to respond the way I wanted, but it seemed to work.  We’ll see how it goes.  It could be a nice homework assignment.

And, though I haven’t tried it yet, it seems like this exercise could also be slightly modified for use with the audio on the ChatGPT iPhone app to correct pronunciation.   All students would have to do would be to add a sentence like this to the prompt: “Please also let me know if I have pronounced any words incorrectly.”

What do you think?