Month: September 2023

ChatGPT oh yeah baby

ChatGPT– what is it good for? Schlub work, say it again! ChatGPT is one of the best tools I have ever seen for language teaching because it takes much of the schlub work– the tedium, the boring stuff– out of transcribing class activities.

Low on reading material? Need some reading material about your own students? How about some reading material about your own students which comes with its own simple quiz? Yes, yes and yes, obviously. Well, fret no more: ChatGPT is here to help.

Check it: I asked ChatGPT to “write a TPRS-style story about a boy named Mustafa who likes monkeys. Include humour and dialogue and use a limited number of unique words.“

I then told it to “make a multiple-choice quiz about the story,” and the results are here.

What did I get? Well, it’s not perfect…but it’s pretty damned good, the Spanish is grammatically correct, and it took literally 20 seconds. Some of the modifications I have played around with include:

  • include…humour, dialogue, descriptions of the weather, numbers 0-30, the names of Latin American capital cities, etc etc
  • write in the present/past/future tense
  • use the words ____ , ____ and ______
  • use only the words ____ , ____ and ______
  • exclude _____
  • write at a Grade _____ / CEFR A1 / ACTFL Advanced Low reading level
  • telling it the plot, or specific elements thereof (eg “include a conversation about food” or “include a car chase”)

The possibilities are endless. For example, say you are doing Tina Hargaden’s One-Word Images or my own Draw And Discuss. Put a kid on your computer and have them type (in English or their L1) a description of the OWI or story into ChatGPT. When the OWI description or story narration is done, tell ChatGPT to create a paragraph about ____ in the target language, press “generate” and poof! the program will spit out a printout of what happened in class.

If you are asking a TPRS-style story, you can do the same: have a kid type in a sentence at a time. At the end, you get a printout of EXACTLY what you asked and the class came up with. One could do the same with Movietalk or Picturetalk.

oh also