Jul 16
How AI Tools Can Help You Ace Your CELTA Assignments- WITHOUT CHEATING!
CELTA assignments and ai
Using AI for CELTA assignments- the Box Set!
If you're doing CELTA and want to know how AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini can help with your assignments, you're in the right place. Here are some thoughts from an experienced CELTA tutor about ALL of the FOUR assignments - I hope they're helpful!
There is also lots of help on assignments in the Resource Library...
There is also lots of help on assignments in the Resource Library...
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Downloadable pdfs...
Video transcript
00:00 Introduction
00:45 Some caveats and warnings about using AI
06:29 Language Skills Related Task
15:07 Language Related Task
27:02 Focus on the Learner Assignment
30:27 Lessons from the Classroom Assignment
Introduction
Interested in some thoughts on using AI for CELTA in your assignments?
If you have anything to do with the CELTA course and you scroll away at this point, I’m amazed- that’s got to be my best hook yet!
I’m Jo Gakonga, I’m a teacher educator and I’ve been a CELTA trainer and assessor for over 20 years. I’ve also got a website at ELT-Training.com where I make video based support material for English language teachers at all stages of their careers. Check it out and if you like this, give it a thumbs up and subscribe, I make a new video every week.
Some caveats and warnings about using AI
This is an introduction to a short series on using AI in CELTA and I’ll be making the same disclaimer on all of the videos in this series. Cambridge English have so far put out very little guidance for centres on how AI can be used by trainees so the first thing you should do before you use any of my ideas for using AI in CELTA is to ASK YOUR TUTOR what the policy is for this in YOUR CENTRE and follow what they say.
If you’ve done that- keep watching!
The official guidance that Cambridge HAS put out can be found in the link under this but the main thrust of it is that AI generated content from tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini is acceptable for CELTA and Delta Modules 2 and 3 for the following reasons.
As far as we’re concerned on a CELTA course you’re not expected to do much in the way of ‘further research’ so that last one really applies to Delta. In any case, bibliography generation needs to be treated with caution in my experience as both ChatGPT and Gemini are apt to hallucinate. At best, they don’t give the most helpful sources available and they also just often make things up. ERIC is a better source here if you’re looking for research.
The main issue that Cambridge are concerned about in their guidance is that all sources, including AI sources, are properly cited. This is clearly essential, as it is for any source that you use whether it’s books, internet resources or AI. Cambridge give a couple of examples of how this could be done in their guidance.
It’s worth noting here HOW you can add a reference from AI Tools. Make sure that you’re starting a NEW search each time you use it and when you’ve finished, you can find the share button here on Chat GPT and here on Gemini to give you a link.
It’s also a good idea to copy the answers it gives you- you can use this button here on Chat GPT or here on Gemini –so that you can prove (if you were ever asked to) the results you got. You could also take a screenshot if it’s a single page of material.
However you do this, keep it somewhere safe!
In their guidance, Cambridge do give leads to a couple of other sources that it’s worth knowing about - the JCQ Guidelines and the NILE Guidelines (you can find links to both of these under here too) and they both have some useful things to say about AI.
JCQ
Students must make sure that work submitted for assessment is demonstrably their own. If any sections of their work are reproduced directly from AI generated responses, those elements must be identified by the student and they must understand that this will not allow them to demonstrate that they have independently met the marking criteria and therefore will not be rewarded.
Basically, you can’t just cut and paste and get credit for it- that seems pretty obvious and reasonable to me.
The message is the same with NILE:
AI is used as a tool to support the development of information. The participant, however, maintains a critical analysis and contextualisation of any information so produced in the same way as they would any other materials, and are transparent in the processes they have followed.
The message across the board is clear.
So, the bad news. If you were watching this video because you hoped I was going to tell you the secret prompt to put into Gemini or Chat GPT that would generate a perfect assignment… I can’t do that (and to be honest, wouldn’t if I could)…
But the good news is that as we go through these videos I’m going to show you how you CAN use AI tools effectively to give you enormous help with your assignments and more importantly with your teaching life in the future.
Buckle up – let’s go!
Language Skills Related Task
00:00 Introduction
00:45 Some caveats and warnings about using AI
06:29 Language Skills Related Task
15:07 Language Related Task
27:02 Focus on the Learner Assignment
30:27 Lessons from the Classroom Assignment
Introduction
Interested in some thoughts on using AI for CELTA in your assignments?
If you have anything to do with the CELTA course and you scroll away at this point, I’m amazed- that’s got to be my best hook yet!
I’m Jo Gakonga, I’m a teacher educator and I’ve been a CELTA trainer and assessor for over 20 years. I’ve also got a website at ELT-Training.com where I make video based support material for English language teachers at all stages of their careers. Check it out and if you like this, give it a thumbs up and subscribe, I make a new video every week.
Some caveats and warnings about using AI
This is an introduction to a short series on using AI in CELTA and I’ll be making the same disclaimer on all of the videos in this series. Cambridge English have so far put out very little guidance for centres on how AI can be used by trainees so the first thing you should do before you use any of my ideas for using AI in CELTA is to ASK YOUR TUTOR what the policy is for this in YOUR CENTRE and follow what they say.
If you’ve done that- keep watching!
The official guidance that Cambridge HAS put out can be found in the link under this but the main thrust of it is that AI generated content from tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini is acceptable for CELTA and Delta Modules 2 and 3 for the following reasons.
- to generate ideas for teaching and learning materials
- to carry out initial research into a topic in preparation for an assignment
- to generate a bibliography for further research.
As far as we’re concerned on a CELTA course you’re not expected to do much in the way of ‘further research’ so that last one really applies to Delta. In any case, bibliography generation needs to be treated with caution in my experience as both ChatGPT and Gemini are apt to hallucinate. At best, they don’t give the most helpful sources available and they also just often make things up. ERIC is a better source here if you’re looking for research.
The main issue that Cambridge are concerned about in their guidance is that all sources, including AI sources, are properly cited. This is clearly essential, as it is for any source that you use whether it’s books, internet resources or AI. Cambridge give a couple of examples of how this could be done in their guidance.
It’s worth noting here HOW you can add a reference from AI Tools. Make sure that you’re starting a NEW search each time you use it and when you’ve finished, you can find the share button here on Chat GPT and here on Gemini to give you a link.
It’s also a good idea to copy the answers it gives you- you can use this button here on Chat GPT or here on Gemini –so that you can prove (if you were ever asked to) the results you got. You could also take a screenshot if it’s a single page of material.
However you do this, keep it somewhere safe!
In their guidance, Cambridge do give leads to a couple of other sources that it’s worth knowing about - the JCQ Guidelines and the NILE Guidelines (you can find links to both of these under here too) and they both have some useful things to say about AI.
JCQ
Students must make sure that work submitted for assessment is demonstrably their own. If any sections of their work are reproduced directly from AI generated responses, those elements must be identified by the student and they must understand that this will not allow them to demonstrate that they have independently met the marking criteria and therefore will not be rewarded.
Basically, you can’t just cut and paste and get credit for it- that seems pretty obvious and reasonable to me.
The message is the same with NILE:
AI is used as a tool to support the development of information. The participant, however, maintains a critical analysis and contextualisation of any information so produced in the same way as they would any other materials, and are transparent in the processes they have followed.
The message across the board is clear.
- AI tools can be useful and can be used in CELTA
- You need to use them in a critical way- not just cut and paste
- You need to be honest and open and clear about the way you’ve used it.
So, the bad news. If you were watching this video because you hoped I was going to tell you the secret prompt to put into Gemini or Chat GPT that would generate a perfect assignment… I can’t do that (and to be honest, wouldn’t if I could)…
But the good news is that as we go through these videos I’m going to show you how you CAN use AI tools effectively to give you enormous help with your assignments and more importantly with your teaching life in the future.
Buckle up – let’s go!
Language Skills Related Task
You can see a walk through of this assignment here but a brief overview is that you take a text- in some centres they’ll give you one and in others they’ll ask you to find an authentic text that you like such as a newspaper article. You have to do some research into receptive and productive skills development and then say WHY the text is suitable for your learners and devise appropriate tasks for developing receptive skills (reading or listening) and productive skills (speaking or writing). Let’s look at these things one by one.
Let’s look at reading skills next.
You’ll probably need to devise a task for reading for gist reading and another for reading for specific information. Gist first.
Gist tasks aren’t easy. You want something that makes sure learners have an overview of the whole text. How do you do this without asking specific questions?
If you put in the text and ask Gemini or Chat GPT to give you a gist task, they don’t do well. They’ll give you a list of comprehension questions and that’s not what you want.
You could give learners the title of the article and ask them to predict the content- maybe in pairs- then elicit some ideas and ask them to read to check. You don’t need AI for this but it won’t work with every text. Can you see the problem in this case with that task?
Smoker to spend month alone on tiny Scots island in bid to break cigarette habit - the title tells the whole story- there’s no need to read at all.
How about a couple of other ideas that AI CAN help you with? Here we go. Remember you need to be critical.
The first one is to give your learners three different titles so that they read quickly and decide which is the best. You can, of course, make them up yourself, but AI can take the back work out of it, leaving you to critically choose between the ideas it generates.
I put the text into Chat GPT and asked it: Give me three possible titles for this article. One should be a GOOD possible title- two should be BAD titles.
This is what I got…
If you don’t like these, just ask for more. Now decide which two of these four are best/ most plausible/ for your learners and use these with the ‘good’ title for your gist task.
I asked Gemini to do the same thing with much less successful results. In this case, the AI gave me titles that were less good but still appropriate.
As with all things AI, the important thing here is to try out different tools, different prompts and don’t be afraid to be critical and edit the result.
A second gist task could be to give the paragraphs subtitles and ask learners to match the mixed up titles with the paragraphs. Again, in this case, ChatGPT gave me a pretty reasonable set of subheadings- you can see them here…
…but Gemini’s were too complex and in one case just factually wrong (cold showers aren’t mentioned in the text.
Let’s move on now to comprehension questions.
AI can generate questions that require an overall understanding of the text. And reasonable T/F questions, including answers - just ask it but there are three main issues to watch out for:
ISSUE 1- it doesn’t differentiate questions that can be answered from real world knowledge.
ISSUE 2- some of the questions it generates will include language that can be lifted from the text- maybe not understood.
ISSUE 3- language grading- can ask it to make the language simpler but easier to edit yourself.
With all of these a useful way forward is to ask for more questions than you need (ask for 15 if you want 10, for example) and then use the best ones, weeding out any that have issues 1 and 2 and editing any of the others to make sure the language grading is OK for your class.
In your assignment explain how and why you did this.
Productive skills
So that’s the receptive skills side of things- what about tasks to develop productive skills- speaking and writing?
AI does a good job of this. I asked it for three speaking activities that would be useful from the topic of the text and got these three, all of which I feel are useful and relevant.
Your job here is to critically decide which would be most suitable for your learners based on their age, ability and interests. You might also want to include how you would set the activity up and any potential difficulties there might be with it, for example with the language needed or with the set up- classroom management issues such as more confident learners dominating for example.
Language Related TaskThis Language Related Task assignment is the one where you have to analyse grammar, vocabulary and functional language for teaching purposes and it’s often the one that candidates worry about and very often the one that has to be resubmitted for changes. It’s a skill you need to learn and for many trainees, they feel a serious lack of knowledge of grammar terminology. If you feel this way, my Grammar for Language Teachers course has helped thousands of trainees and is recommended by centres all over the world (just saying!).
The Big Question?- can AI help with this assignment. The main thing to understand is that it can’t do it for you and it’s still useful to use more traditional reference sources as well- a dictionary for vocabulary and a reference book like Murphy, Parrott or Swan for grammar structures for example. AI can give you a lot of help but it can also get confused with the language of the context. Let me walk you through a couple of examples:
Here's an item of vocabulary – pension. Let’s assume we want to analyse this for teaching purposes in the context of ‘My Dad worked as a farmer for most of his life but he retired when he was 60 and started to draw his pension’.
This is what a dictionary will give you. Here’s the meaning, the form and the pronunciation. It tells us it’s a B2 level word, gives a clear definition that we can turn into concept check questions. We’ve got the pronunciation here with the stress and the phonemic transcription and the form here- it’s a countable noun and here are some common collocations.
Let’s see what AI gives us in terms of meaning, form and pronunciation. I asked Gemini first and as you can see, it gives us these and a lot of other information. Some parts of this are definitely more helpful than others, though, so as I said before, you need to approach the information critically.
It gives us a definition- OK- but I’m not sure that ‘in their golden years’ is so great and I wouldn’t include it for learners. It does give us alternative meanings, though and I can see that the boarding house one is useful to consider as it’s a false friend in a lot of European languages.
Chat GPT gives us the same thing but it also includes teaching tips that I personally think are a bit dodgy. If you look at these ideas they fall into the same traps that CELTA trainees often do- they are explaining the CONCEPT of a pension as if the person you were teaching it to didn’t know what one was. Your adult learners DO know what a pension is- they know it’s important to plan for the future- they just don’t know the WORD for it in English.
In terms of the form, Gemini tells us that the noun is the most common form and also gives us a verb form that I think is rather unusual. I can see to ‘pension someone off’ but I think ‘to pension’ is pretty unusual and I wouldn’t include it in a B1 language analysis. Like the dictionary, it gives related words- pensioner (yes- useful) and pensionable ..hmm I think I’d only use this in the expression ‘pensionable age’.
Chat GPT is more straightforward and tells us it’s a noun (but not whether it’s countable or not) and also includes its etymology. Definitely not needed in a language analysis!
Moving on to the pronunciation, Chat GPT gives us a simple transcription- great but then a huge amount of linguistic information that’s not needed for this assignment. Gemini doesn’t give us a transcription here- although you can prompt it to do that later. It suggests practising similar words like ‘tension’ but according to the Cambridge dictionary (and my intuition) this is also a B2 level word so they might not know it.
I asked Gemini to give me concept check questions for ‘pension’ and got this response.
I think this first one is really useful:
Yes/No: Do you get a pension when you are still working? (No)
But the next one could easily be misleading:
Is the person on the beach just relaxing? Do they have to be getting a pension?
The next ideas are quite helpful. These are words that could be confused but the other questions don’t seem so good to me although some could work. What do you think?
I HATE the bonus idea- how are you supposed to act this out??
I asked Chat GPT to do the same thing and this is what I got. Although it’s maybe over-egging the pudding, these definitely cover the meaning of ‘pension.
Let’s try with a grammar structure- here’s an example: I’ve been really busy this year. The present perfect for unfinished time- The being busy is still true now but the time is ongoing- we’re still in this year.
If we look in a grammar book, like Parrott, we get potential difficulties with the meaning and the form…
And he tells us how to form the tense.
This does, of course make the assumption that you know what the tense is called. If you don’t, you might think AI could help with that- let’s try it.
Hmm- this was my first attempt and although it’s got the right meaning, it’s mis-identified the tense.
I asked it again and it got it right but I think this is another lesson in ‘don’t take everything it says at face value.
This time, it gave me a much more accurate answer and an explanation that I thought was very user friendly.
I tried out Chat GPT- this time using the same marker sentence that Parrot uses so that I could compare like with like: Here’s ChatGPT:
And it gives teaching tips here.
And here’s Parrott.
For the sake of completeness, I asked Gemini, too and got this which, again, is useful and reasonable, but for the pronunciation, it gave me this which isn’t accurate here... had CAN be weak like this, but here it’s a past participle and the main lexical verb here, so it’s not – it says ‘had’.
Using reference books also has the advantage that they come from writers with experience of the difficulties faced by learners, so they’ll give you other useful information that you might not think to ask. Examples like these rules of thumb that might not always be helpful from Parrott or this summary of the differences between the present perfect simple and continuous.
We need to check meaning, so I asked Gemini first- These are either inaccurate- one of the accidents COULD be today or else rather convoluted and not very clear or helpful.
ChatGPT did much better with this CCQ question although #1 uses the target language and #2 focuses on the context, so neither of these is great. Some of the others, though are sensible and useful. As with all of this, you have to take a critical approach.
Moving on, as part of the language related task and of your teaching practice, you’ll often be asked to analyse functional language- a piece of language that fulfils a particular purpose in the language (advising/ persuading/ expressing likes etc). These functional exponents as they’re called are often phrases, so they’re less easy to look up in a dictionary or grammar book and AI can be helpful here.
I gave ChatGPT and Gemini the task of analysing ‘How about going for a drive?’ and this is what I got. Mostly pretty useful.
Note that whatever you ask as CCQs, Gemini seems to automatically throw up this as a Bonus and it’s usually ridiculous…
The overall message here is that AI can give you really useful information about analysing language but you’re going to have to be a bit careful about what you choose to use. Checking information that you get from AI against a grammar book or a dictionary will help you to make sure your information is accurate and also to widen your understanding of the forms you’re analysing.
Remember that you also need to cite ALL sources you use- whether that’s grammar books, dictionaries or AI and with the latter in particular you need to share the link to the Chat and maybe screenshots of the relevant parts of the chat to show that you haven’t simply cut and pasted.
Focus on the Learner
Here are some ideas on how AI could help you with the Focus on the Learner assignment.
This is the one where you do a needs analysis for a learner or a group, then look at what some of their language problems are and give some ideas to help. You can see a walk through of this assignment here- it might be helpful to watch this first!
OK- are you ready? Let’s look at the case where you interview a particular learner. In part 1, you give some background about the learner that’s relevant to their language learning history and needs. You really need to do this on your own – I can’t see how AI could help very much.
In the next part, you are looking at their linguistic strengths and weaknesses so you need to observe them in TP to see how strong their different skills are- reading, writing, speaking, listening and what kind of activities they prefer. You’re also going to record a short interview with them and get them to do some writing so that you can analyse their language strengths and needs.
One thing that technology can really help with here is in transcribing the interview. Having it written down isn’t mandatory in most centres, but it’ll make it much easier for you to spot the errors they’re making. There are lots of speech-to-text apps such as otter.ai and https://turboscribe.ai/ that will give you a good approximation that you can then edit. Remember that this WON’T help you to identify errors in pronunciation though- you’ll have to listen for those.
When you have the transcript, or the learner’s written work, you could put it into AI and ask it to identify the most important language errors. It will do this, but be careful that it isn’t always very accurate and it doesn’t always prioritise what would likely be the most important errors. So again, treat what it tells you with caution. Check against your own intuition and against other reference books such as Learner English.
While we’re on the subject of Learner English, this book is the one that’s usually recommended for this assignment and it’s great but it doesn’t have every language in the world in it obviously, so another way that AI could be helpful is, if your learner’s language isn’t in this book you could ask what are the biggest difficulties for people learning English coming from that particular language.
AI does a useful job of this- this is what it gave me for Italian- and will also give you ideas for how to address these BUT make sure that you are not blindly parroting what the AI has told you. You need to look at the issues that YOUR learner has, not just that any speaker of their first language has.
In the final part of this assignment, you have to choose some material that would be useful for your learner based on the issues you identified. You could ask AI to suggest some activities here, but a lot of centres ask you to specifically find published material and I think that this is more useful because it’s what you have to do in the classroom and getting more familiar where to find things like this is super-helpful.
Lessons from the Classroom
Here are some ideas on how AI could help you with the Lessons from the Classoom assignment.
You can see a walk through of this assignment here and it’s the one where you will reflect on your progress through the course- your strengths and your action points and how you can address them in the future and continue to develop.
This is a very personal assignment- in some ways the easiest of the four but in many ways the most important. It’s difficult to see how AI can help with such a personal topic but it CAN be a helpful brainstorming partner.
Try inputting your feedback from your most recent teaching practice into it and ask it HOW you should focus on these areas. Some of the ideas it comes up with FOR SURE will be nonsense but some of them will resonate with you so choose the ones that do. As with all of this, you need to choose critically and describe why you feel this will be helpful.
For example, where ‘teaching pronunciation’ was an action point, resources for this were shown here- I’m not sure how the interactive phonemic chart would be helpful for planning – although you could use this to develop your own knowledge of the symbols. Mark Hancock’s book, on the other hand, would definitely be a good source for games and activities to include in your class to improve your pronunciation teaching.
Don’t forget that in this assignment you need to make reference to the feedback you have had from peers as well as tutors and aspects of the teaching observations that have helped you, whether that’s on video, from watching experienced teachers or from your peer observation. AI definitely can’t help you here!
A part of the assignment that could be helped by AI is again as a brainstorming tool to give you ideas
for resources to help you develop after the course. If you ask this question, a range will come up including methodology and resource books, teachers associations and other useful things.
As always, be critical about what you choose and transparent about citing and reporting this.
So that’s it for this series- there’s quite a bit here and I hope it’s been helpful. Good luck with your assignments and remember that a CRITICAL and TRANSPARENT approach will mean that you are able to USE the power of AI both in your assignments and onwards into your teaching career where you might also find my course AI Powered Language Teaching helpful – check it out on my site!
Good luck with it all!
Receptive skills
With this task, you need to do some reading around skills development and cite this and it’s still important to do this in the old fashioned way. Look at some of the books recommended by your centre and find out more about receptive and productive skills to give a rationale for your tasks. This background will also give you a better ability to do what I keep saying is important and critically appraise the tasks that AI can produce.
I’m going to work on the assumption that you’re dealing with a written text. You could do the assignment on a listening text, but it’s easier to show with the written word, so let’s stick to that. Here’s the example I’m going to work with (you can download the text from the link above).
You have your text and you want to see if it’s appropriate for your learners. If you want to know what the level of the text is, you can paste it into Vocab Kitchen and it’ll tell you how difficult the vocabulary in the text is. You have to be a bit careful with this. It’ll give you an idea, but it’s not perfect because it only deals with single words and vocabulary is made up of more than this. For example, ‘look’ is an A1 word and so is ‘up’ and ‘to’ but ‘look up to’ means something different and is B2 level.
Putting the text here’ll also help you to pick out any vocabulary that you might need to pre-teach.
Remember that you can’t pre-teach everything they’re not likely to know- especially with an authentic text- so aim for anything that will really block understanding of the WHOLE text and anything they need to know to answer the questions you ask. In this case, for example, ‘desperation’ and ‘temptation’ are coming up as C1 level words but not knowing them won’t stop learners understating the text. The other C1 word, ‘uninhabited’ on the other hand, is pretty important and I would pre-teach that.
You can ask AI to pick out words for you but it doesn’t do so well with this- it tends to choose too much vocabulary and it’s often not needed or would be known. Here’s an example from ChatGPT.
At B1 level, I would definitely expect that smoker/ mobile phone/ extra life/ shave my head/ achieve my goal would all be known and the only word here that’s really important to understand the text is ‘uninhabited island’.
So, you could ask for words to pre-teach, but treat the list it generates critically.
With this task, you need to do some reading around skills development and cite this and it’s still important to do this in the old fashioned way. Look at some of the books recommended by your centre and find out more about receptive and productive skills to give a rationale for your tasks. This background will also give you a better ability to do what I keep saying is important and critically appraise the tasks that AI can produce.
I’m going to work on the assumption that you’re dealing with a written text. You could do the assignment on a listening text, but it’s easier to show with the written word, so let’s stick to that. Here’s the example I’m going to work with (you can download the text from the link above).
You have your text and you want to see if it’s appropriate for your learners. If you want to know what the level of the text is, you can paste it into Vocab Kitchen and it’ll tell you how difficult the vocabulary in the text is. You have to be a bit careful with this. It’ll give you an idea, but it’s not perfect because it only deals with single words and vocabulary is made up of more than this. For example, ‘look’ is an A1 word and so is ‘up’ and ‘to’ but ‘look up to’ means something different and is B2 level.
Putting the text here’ll also help you to pick out any vocabulary that you might need to pre-teach.
Remember that you can’t pre-teach everything they’re not likely to know- especially with an authentic text- so aim for anything that will really block understanding of the WHOLE text and anything they need to know to answer the questions you ask. In this case, for example, ‘desperation’ and ‘temptation’ are coming up as C1 level words but not knowing them won’t stop learners understating the text. The other C1 word, ‘uninhabited’ on the other hand, is pretty important and I would pre-teach that.
You can ask AI to pick out words for you but it doesn’t do so well with this- it tends to choose too much vocabulary and it’s often not needed or would be known. Here’s an example from ChatGPT.
At B1 level, I would definitely expect that smoker/ mobile phone/ extra life/ shave my head/ achieve my goal would all be known and the only word here that’s really important to understand the text is ‘uninhabited island’.
So, you could ask for words to pre-teach, but treat the list it generates critically.
Let’s look at reading skills next.
You’ll probably need to devise a task for reading for gist reading and another for reading for specific information. Gist first.
Gist tasks aren’t easy. You want something that makes sure learners have an overview of the whole text. How do you do this without asking specific questions?
If you put in the text and ask Gemini or Chat GPT to give you a gist task, they don’t do well. They’ll give you a list of comprehension questions and that’s not what you want.
You could give learners the title of the article and ask them to predict the content- maybe in pairs- then elicit some ideas and ask them to read to check. You don’t need AI for this but it won’t work with every text. Can you see the problem in this case with that task?
Smoker to spend month alone on tiny Scots island in bid to break cigarette habit - the title tells the whole story- there’s no need to read at all.
How about a couple of other ideas that AI CAN help you with? Here we go. Remember you need to be critical.
The first one is to give your learners three different titles so that they read quickly and decide which is the best. You can, of course, make them up yourself, but AI can take the back work out of it, leaving you to critically choose between the ideas it generates.
I put the text into Chat GPT and asked it: Give me three possible titles for this article. One should be a GOOD possible title- two should be BAD titles.
This is what I got…
If you don’t like these, just ask for more. Now decide which two of these four are best/ most plausible/ for your learners and use these with the ‘good’ title for your gist task.
I asked Gemini to do the same thing with much less successful results. In this case, the AI gave me titles that were less good but still appropriate.
As with all things AI, the important thing here is to try out different tools, different prompts and don’t be afraid to be critical and edit the result.
A second gist task could be to give the paragraphs subtitles and ask learners to match the mixed up titles with the paragraphs. Again, in this case, ChatGPT gave me a pretty reasonable set of subheadings- you can see them here…
…but Gemini’s were too complex and in one case just factually wrong (cold showers aren’t mentioned in the text.
Let’s move on now to comprehension questions.
AI can generate questions that require an overall understanding of the text. And reasonable T/F questions, including answers - just ask it but there are three main issues to watch out for:
ISSUE 1- it doesn’t differentiate questions that can be answered from real world knowledge.
ISSUE 2- some of the questions it generates will include language that can be lifted from the text- maybe not understood.
ISSUE 3- language grading- can ask it to make the language simpler but easier to edit yourself.
With all of these a useful way forward is to ask for more questions than you need (ask for 15 if you want 10, for example) and then use the best ones, weeding out any that have issues 1 and 2 and editing any of the others to make sure the language grading is OK for your class.
In your assignment explain how and why you did this.
Productive skills
So that’s the receptive skills side of things- what about tasks to develop productive skills- speaking and writing?
AI does a good job of this. I asked it for three speaking activities that would be useful from the topic of the text and got these three, all of which I feel are useful and relevant.
Your job here is to critically decide which would be most suitable for your learners based on their age, ability and interests. You might also want to include how you would set the activity up and any potential difficulties there might be with it, for example with the language needed or with the set up- classroom management issues such as more confident learners dominating for example.
Language Related Task
The Big Question?- can AI help with this assignment. The main thing to understand is that it can’t do it for you and it’s still useful to use more traditional reference sources as well- a dictionary for vocabulary and a reference book like Murphy, Parrott or Swan for grammar structures for example. AI can give you a lot of help but it can also get confused with the language of the context. Let me walk you through a couple of examples:
Here's an item of vocabulary – pension. Let’s assume we want to analyse this for teaching purposes in the context of ‘My Dad worked as a farmer for most of his life but he retired when he was 60 and started to draw his pension’.
This is what a dictionary will give you. Here’s the meaning, the form and the pronunciation. It tells us it’s a B2 level word, gives a clear definition that we can turn into concept check questions. We’ve got the pronunciation here with the stress and the phonemic transcription and the form here- it’s a countable noun and here are some common collocations.
Let’s see what AI gives us in terms of meaning, form and pronunciation. I asked Gemini first and as you can see, it gives us these and a lot of other information. Some parts of this are definitely more helpful than others, though, so as I said before, you need to approach the information critically.
It gives us a definition- OK- but I’m not sure that ‘in their golden years’ is so great and I wouldn’t include it for learners. It does give us alternative meanings, though and I can see that the boarding house one is useful to consider as it’s a false friend in a lot of European languages.
Chat GPT gives us the same thing but it also includes teaching tips that I personally think are a bit dodgy. If you look at these ideas they fall into the same traps that CELTA trainees often do- they are explaining the CONCEPT of a pension as if the person you were teaching it to didn’t know what one was. Your adult learners DO know what a pension is- they know it’s important to plan for the future- they just don’t know the WORD for it in English.
In terms of the form, Gemini tells us that the noun is the most common form and also gives us a verb form that I think is rather unusual. I can see to ‘pension someone off’ but I think ‘to pension’ is pretty unusual and I wouldn’t include it in a B1 language analysis. Like the dictionary, it gives related words- pensioner (yes- useful) and pensionable ..hmm I think I’d only use this in the expression ‘pensionable age’.
Chat GPT is more straightforward and tells us it’s a noun (but not whether it’s countable or not) and also includes its etymology. Definitely not needed in a language analysis!
Moving on to the pronunciation, Chat GPT gives us a simple transcription- great but then a huge amount of linguistic information that’s not needed for this assignment. Gemini doesn’t give us a transcription here- although you can prompt it to do that later. It suggests practising similar words like ‘tension’ but according to the Cambridge dictionary (and my intuition) this is also a B2 level word so they might not know it.
I asked Gemini to give me concept check questions for ‘pension’ and got this response.
I think this first one is really useful:
Yes/No: Do you get a pension when you are still working? (No)
But the next one could easily be misleading:
Is the person on the beach just relaxing? Do they have to be getting a pension?
The next ideas are quite helpful. These are words that could be confused but the other questions don’t seem so good to me although some could work. What do you think?
I HATE the bonus idea- how are you supposed to act this out??
I asked Chat GPT to do the same thing and this is what I got. Although it’s maybe over-egging the pudding, these definitely cover the meaning of ‘pension.
Let’s try with a grammar structure- here’s an example: I’ve been really busy this year. The present perfect for unfinished time- The being busy is still true now but the time is ongoing- we’re still in this year.
If we look in a grammar book, like Parrott, we get potential difficulties with the meaning and the form…
And he tells us how to form the tense.
This does, of course make the assumption that you know what the tense is called. If you don’t, you might think AI could help with that- let’s try it.
Hmm- this was my first attempt and although it’s got the right meaning, it’s mis-identified the tense.
I asked it again and it got it right but I think this is another lesson in ‘don’t take everything it says at face value.
This time, it gave me a much more accurate answer and an explanation that I thought was very user friendly.
I tried out Chat GPT- this time using the same marker sentence that Parrot uses so that I could compare like with like: Here’s ChatGPT:
And it gives teaching tips here.
And here’s Parrott.
For the sake of completeness, I asked Gemini, too and got this which, again, is useful and reasonable, but for the pronunciation, it gave me this which isn’t accurate here... had CAN be weak like this, but here it’s a past participle and the main lexical verb here, so it’s not – it says ‘had’.
Using reference books also has the advantage that they come from writers with experience of the difficulties faced by learners, so they’ll give you other useful information that you might not think to ask. Examples like these rules of thumb that might not always be helpful from Parrott or this summary of the differences between the present perfect simple and continuous.
We need to check meaning, so I asked Gemini first- These are either inaccurate- one of the accidents COULD be today or else rather convoluted and not very clear or helpful.
ChatGPT did much better with this CCQ question although #1 uses the target language and #2 focuses on the context, so neither of these is great. Some of the others, though are sensible and useful. As with all of this, you have to take a critical approach.
Moving on, as part of the language related task and of your teaching practice, you’ll often be asked to analyse functional language- a piece of language that fulfils a particular purpose in the language (advising/ persuading/ expressing likes etc). These functional exponents as they’re called are often phrases, so they’re less easy to look up in a dictionary or grammar book and AI can be helpful here.
I gave ChatGPT and Gemini the task of analysing ‘How about going for a drive?’ and this is what I got. Mostly pretty useful.
Note that whatever you ask as CCQs, Gemini seems to automatically throw up this as a Bonus and it’s usually ridiculous…
The overall message here is that AI can give you really useful information about analysing language but you’re going to have to be a bit careful about what you choose to use. Checking information that you get from AI against a grammar book or a dictionary will help you to make sure your information is accurate and also to widen your understanding of the forms you’re analysing.
Remember that you also need to cite ALL sources you use- whether that’s grammar books, dictionaries or AI and with the latter in particular you need to share the link to the Chat and maybe screenshots of the relevant parts of the chat to show that you haven’t simply cut and pasted.
Focus on the Learner
Here are some ideas on how AI could help you with the Focus on the Learner assignment.
This is the one where you do a needs analysis for a learner or a group, then look at what some of their language problems are and give some ideas to help. You can see a walk through of this assignment here- it might be helpful to watch this first!
OK- are you ready? Let’s look at the case where you interview a particular learner. In part 1, you give some background about the learner that’s relevant to their language learning history and needs. You really need to do this on your own – I can’t see how AI could help very much.
In the next part, you are looking at their linguistic strengths and weaknesses so you need to observe them in TP to see how strong their different skills are- reading, writing, speaking, listening and what kind of activities they prefer. You’re also going to record a short interview with them and get them to do some writing so that you can analyse their language strengths and needs.
One thing that technology can really help with here is in transcribing the interview. Having it written down isn’t mandatory in most centres, but it’ll make it much easier for you to spot the errors they’re making. There are lots of speech-to-text apps such as otter.ai and https://turboscribe.ai/ that will give you a good approximation that you can then edit. Remember that this WON’T help you to identify errors in pronunciation though- you’ll have to listen for those.
When you have the transcript, or the learner’s written work, you could put it into AI and ask it to identify the most important language errors. It will do this, but be careful that it isn’t always very accurate and it doesn’t always prioritise what would likely be the most important errors. So again, treat what it tells you with caution. Check against your own intuition and against other reference books such as Learner English.
While we’re on the subject of Learner English, this book is the one that’s usually recommended for this assignment and it’s great but it doesn’t have every language in the world in it obviously, so another way that AI could be helpful is, if your learner’s language isn’t in this book you could ask what are the biggest difficulties for people learning English coming from that particular language.
AI does a useful job of this- this is what it gave me for Italian- and will also give you ideas for how to address these BUT make sure that you are not blindly parroting what the AI has told you. You need to look at the issues that YOUR learner has, not just that any speaker of their first language has.
In the final part of this assignment, you have to choose some material that would be useful for your learner based on the issues you identified. You could ask AI to suggest some activities here, but a lot of centres ask you to specifically find published material and I think that this is more useful because it’s what you have to do in the classroom and getting more familiar where to find things like this is super-helpful.
Lessons from the Classroom
Here are some ideas on how AI could help you with the Lessons from the Classoom assignment.
You can see a walk through of this assignment here and it’s the one where you will reflect on your progress through the course- your strengths and your action points and how you can address them in the future and continue to develop.
This is a very personal assignment- in some ways the easiest of the four but in many ways the most important. It’s difficult to see how AI can help with such a personal topic but it CAN be a helpful brainstorming partner.
Try inputting your feedback from your most recent teaching practice into it and ask it HOW you should focus on these areas. Some of the ideas it comes up with FOR SURE will be nonsense but some of them will resonate with you so choose the ones that do. As with all of this, you need to choose critically and describe why you feel this will be helpful.
For example, where ‘teaching pronunciation’ was an action point, resources for this were shown here- I’m not sure how the interactive phonemic chart would be helpful for planning – although you could use this to develop your own knowledge of the symbols. Mark Hancock’s book, on the other hand, would definitely be a good source for games and activities to include in your class to improve your pronunciation teaching.
Don’t forget that in this assignment you need to make reference to the feedback you have had from peers as well as tutors and aspects of the teaching observations that have helped you, whether that’s on video, from watching experienced teachers or from your peer observation. AI definitely can’t help you here!
A part of the assignment that could be helped by AI is again as a brainstorming tool to give you ideas
for resources to help you develop after the course. If you ask this question, a range will come up including methodology and resource books, teachers associations and other useful things.
As always, be critical about what you choose and transparent about citing and reporting this.
So that’s it for this series- there’s quite a bit here and I hope it’s been helpful. Good luck with your assignments and remember that a CRITICAL and TRANSPARENT approach will mean that you are able to USE the power of AI both in your assignments and onwards into your teaching career where you might also find my course AI Powered Language Teaching helpful – check it out on my site!
Good luck with it all!
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If you don't see it, please check your Junk or Promotion folders and add jo.gakonga@elt-training.com to your contacts.
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