Nicola Work, OFLA Editor for Electronic Media 
Associate Professor of French, University of Dayton

ChatGPT arrived in a whirlwind in November 2022 and took educators by surprise. All of sudden, a free-of-charge AI platform appeared that allowed its users to ask for the creation of written content based on everything available on the internet. 

What is ChatGPT? It is an AI chatbot that can produce human-like written language on a variety of topics. It can write essays, solve math problems, create code, translate, write poems and songs, emails and letters, summarize information, and so much more. Not only can users ask to have an email or essay written for them, but they can also ask to have the product refined based on the audience, level of language and detail, as well writing style. And all this in record-time with a convenient chat-based interface. You can even hold an actual conversation with ChatGPT in many different languages. 

How does it work? You can create a free account, which uses ChatGPT 3.5, or a paid subscription that uses the newest version of ChatGPT at https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt. To get started, think of a question or prompt and write it in the box at the bottom of the page. ChatGPT answers your question in real time, writing on the screen as if someone were typing. Once the answer is finished, you can ask follow-up questions, refine your prompt, ask for more details, to name a few. It mimics a real conversation. The information produced is a one-of-a-kind, originally created answer that is based on all the information available on the web. As such, many do not consider it plagiarism because the answer created is original, cannot be traced, and will be different when you ask the same question again or if you click “regenerate answer”. However, the older, free version of ChatGPT is more limited and cannot refer to very recent information and events.

The arrival of ChatGPT, and later other AI tools, created a shockwave in education with educators and administrators scrambling to stay up-to-date with the latest AI and learning about how to deal with it in educational settings. Once students started using ChatGPT to, for example, write their college admission essays, to produce text in a foreign language, or to create essays for classes, educators and administrators were forced to come up with ways to deal with AI’s existence. A first approach was to try to impede students from using the tool at all – this might work in class on traditional paper-and-pencil tests and written assignments without the use of technology, but would be extremely hard to control outside of the classroom. But since this tool will most likely stick around, assignments and admission requirements might have to be adapted to prevent the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT to complete graded tests, written assignments, and essays. Many educators are fearful of the students’ use of this technology to cheat. Educators could change assignment prompts to include class specific readings, personalization, and more recent events to try to prevent students from using ChatGPT. But, what if students and educators used ChatGPT to help them and make some things easier?

Rather than not being allowed to use the tool at all, students can use it in guided ways as part of the research and/or writing process. ChatGPT can serve as a starting point for students’  research to get an introduction into any given topic. Outlines and paragraph structure can also be provided by ChatGPT aiding students in organizing their work. ChatGPT provides definitions and explanations of concepts with examples. In language classes specifically, ChatGPT can serve as a personal conversation partner in a multitude of different languages. Using a voice control plugin allows students to dictate their messages making this interaction even more interactive. ChatGPT can also create vocabulary lists on a specific topic, can give grammar explanations, and can provide reading comprehension questions for any text copied into the textbox. These are just a few ideas of how students can use ChatGPT in their learning without using the tool to create an entire paper, essay, or other written assignment for them.

There are a myriad of ways in which teachers can use ChatGPT to make their teaching lives easier. It can help with creativity when one is not feeling very creative.  Moreover, ChatGPT can do all of the following tasks in English, but also in many other languages. ChatGPT can provide explanations of theories and concepts, definitions of terminology with examples, suggest additional resources, compile existing information, and summarize individual texts. Think of it as a Google search on steroids. ChatGPT can also help with improving a written text in that one could ask it to make a given text more concise, find weaknesses, make it simpler, or ask it to provide feedback based on vocabulary choice, grammar, or spelling. For teaching specific purposes, ChatGPT can create activities for various proficiency levels that practice a variety of grammar and vocabulary topics. It can create questions for conversation starters, assignment prompts, text starters, outlines. It can also create various types of puzzles such as word searches and mazes, games, poems, limericks, songs and much more. ChatGPT can write lesson plans with objectives, materials needed, instructions, times, and sequenced activities practicing the four skills. ChatGPT can also provide a list of high frequency words in a given language, create small dialogues for class, and produce sample texts to analyze. Another fun use of ChatGPT: You can also practice your own language skills in that you can have a (written) conversation with the AI Chatbot. 

AI is here to stay: Instead of forbidding the use of it, we, as educators, need to be aware of its existence and might need to adapt some of our teaching practices. There are many ways in which ChatGPT can be an extremely useful tool both for students and teachers. We should challenge ourselves to embrace it!

Further readings:
How to use ChatGPT as a learning tool
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/06/chatgpt-learning-tool
6 ways to use ChatGPT to learn a foreign language
https://www.icls.edu/6-ways-to-use-chatgpt-to-learn-a-foreign-language/