At this point, ChatGPT has been around for some time and people have been using it for everything and anything. I wasn’t any different and used it a few times to get inspiration or to facilitate my working process. Here are some ways ChatGPT came in handy, with all its benefits and shortcomings.
I first came into contact with ChatGPT in February or March of this year. I was a bit hesitant at first and didn’t want to use it, as I thought it was another trend that was going to disappear. However, after reading the statements and experiences of some reputable people, discussing how AI saves them a ton of work, I gave it a try. After a few months of trial and error, I created a list of ways in which ChatGPT reduces my workload and the prompts you need to type to get the desired result.
Lesson planning
I’m a creature of habit and like to stick to some lesson plans that work well for me. This includes trial lessons, which I do at least twice a month. Of course, I want to entice new students right away, so the lesson plan needs to be good. Unfortunately, every now and then, I like to update my impeccable trial lesson plan as I get bored with it. I was unsure how to up my game, so I asked ChatGPT to help me with this problem. It was my first time using it, and after typing an insufficient prompt, I was presented with a mediocre lesson plan. You can read all about it and how I adapted it to my needs in the A2 trial lesson plan by ChatGPT.
However, I didn’t give up and started playing around with the idea of adjusting my prompts and making them a bit more detailed to get better results. My first successful lesson plan that needed only a few changes was B1 – My last trip (conditionals). I realised that I needed to put more than just a simple prompt. To get better results, I typed in the level, the objective and the topic of the lesson: B1 level lesson plan on past travels, using first, second and third conditionals. The first lesson plan was okay-ish, but I wanted something more, so I asked the programme to regenerate the response two more times. That’s how I ended up with three lesson plan ideas, which I stitched together and created one lesson plan that suited my needs.
Writing materials
I tend to create lesson plans based on authentic materials, which I find before I start crafting a plan. That isn’t always the case, though. If I want to focus on a certain topic, and I don’t have anything level appropriate, I try to invent a short dialogue or text that works well in this class. I used this method twice, once in the class about conditionals and the other time in A2 – Phobias (possessive adjectives and pronouns). In the first case, I asked ChatGPT to write a B1-level story about problems when travelling using first, second and third conditional. In the second one, I asked for a short A2-level dialogue on phobias. Both times I was given something, but it just wasn’t good enough. Nevertheless, I used the generated responses to write something similar, but level appropriate and slightly more natural. It wasn’t all that great, but in the grand scheme of things, it reduced preparation time by quite a lot. Below you can see how I changed the B1 story on travelling and adapted it to my needs.
Course preparation
The need to create a course came when one of my students asked me to prepare her for an upcoming job interview. I have taught a few job interview lessons before and even created a great lesson plan on discussing soft skills that you can read about in B1/B2 – Job interview – Soft skills, but this time needed something more. As I didn’t have that much experience teaching Business English or creating courses, I turned to ChatGPT for help – this time it was very successful. I typed in Create a 10-lesson ESL course on job interview preparation for a B1-level and was presented with a beautifully laid out 10-hour-long course with all the necessary topics and objectives.
Right away I copied and pasted the first lesson objectives –Â B1/B2 – Introduction to Job Interviews, and asked ChatGPT to generate a lesson plan on this topic. Of course, it wasn’t a 100% hit, but it gave me a solid structure to create a good-quality lesson plan on the purpose and types of interviews and different strategies for preparing for an interview. I know that I wouldn’t have come up with such a lesson plan on my own, and even though I needed to find a lot of materials to improve it, it cut down the thinking time.
Timestamps removal (transcripts)
I often use YouTube videos in my classes as a way to get exposed to interesting and authentic materials. I recently was planning a lesson on a matchmaking application, which you can read about in B1 – Dating app ‘Hater’. I could listen to the video over and over again, trying to catch the best vocabulary and think about activities and questions we could do in class. However, to save time, I like to copy and paste the transcript, as it helps me scan it and think about the tasks without rewinding the clips. You can get a transcript of almost any YouTube video by clicking the three dots and copy-pasting it to any word editing software.
In the case of monologues, it’s quite easy to get a clean transcript by asking ChatGPT to remove the timestamps only. Be watchful though, as it likes to change a few words here and there and even some sentences to the point that they don’t look like the original text anymore. It became even more apparent in an interview-style video. The transcript didn’t resemble the video, but I realised that if I only asked it to remove the timestamps and keep the text in an interview style, I got a much better result in mere seconds!
This wasn’t the only benefit of using this technique. Looking at this interview layout, gave me the idea to create a PET Cambridge Listening Part 4 task, in which students listen to the recording and answer a few short multiple-choice questions. Thanks to this prompt, not only did I save loads of time, but also flew through lesson plan preparation as I didn’t have to think of any tasks.
Material level assessment
Before ChatGPT stepped in, I often struggled with this part of lesson preparation. That was the case until I thought about pasting an article, which I used in B2 – A domestic tasks app, into the software and asked it to assess its level using a CEFR scale. It was a huge success! I have been using this trick with every other authentic material, so I know that all the reading and listening activities are appropriate for my students. Here’s an example response for an assessment of a Hater app interview transcript, discussed before.
Identification of higher-level words
Obviously, this level assessment got me thinking about some vocabulary that may be too complex for my B1 students. I could read this text again and assess it myself, but I thought that maybe I could use ChatGPT to help me find them in seconds. Here is the result of those findings.
Surely, it did identify some of the words I was expecting to see, for example, gimmick, differentiate or secure funding, but the rest seems to be a bit of a stretch. I’m more than positive that B1-level students know the meaning of the words wonderful, obsessed and personality. ChatGPT offers some help, but it’s far from perfect, and you still need to go over the words and assess their level yourself. Another problem is that the software ignored my question about identifying higher-level structures and grammar from this recording.
Providing definitions, synonyms and pronunciation
Let’s assume you were satisfied with the higher-level vocabulary picked out by ChatGPT, you may want to cut down searching time and ask the programme to provide you with definitions, synonyms and pronunciation of these words. This was quite useful and quick. If I’d had this trick up my sleeve when I was doing CELTA, it would have saved me lots of time and late-night tears! ChatGPT can even provide you with CCQs, granted they aren’t all that great, but it’s a good starting point for sure.
Task and question creation
The last and probably the main use I’ve seen around the Internet is asking ChatGPT to create multiple-choice and true or false tasks. I’ve experimented with other activities, but I always got mediocre results. First of all, make sure to specify how many wrong and right answers you want in your multiple-choice quiz. If you omit this step, you will be given three correct answers. Another problem I encountered was that some of the answers were convoluted and didn’t match the B1-level tone of the class, so I ended up running with the ideas but rephrasing them myself.
When creating a true or false task for some other lesson, I wanted to give it a go and add another option – the information is not given. ChatGPT skipped this prompt and created true or false sentences only. It would have been fine if the sentences were a bit different from the text. The AI only took the sentences and rewrote them changing a word or two. This task was way too easy, and yet again, I needed to rewrite the phrases using some synonyms to give a chance to my students to understand some words from the context.
I also tried using ChatGPT to create opinion-based questions on certain topics, but I felt like it was a complete misunderstanding. The questions are complicated, and I’m not sure anyone would understand them, no matter the level of classes. For the time being, I’ll be finding my discussion questions online and on ESL Discussion Topics.
Overall, I think that ChatGPT is a great tool that you could use in lesson preparation. It has many benefits, such as timestamp removal, or CEFR level assessment. It is nice to have this readily available at your fingertips. Unfortunately, it cannot prepare good-quality lesson plans, level-appropriate activities and materials that you could use in your classroom. Despite all those shortcomings, I’ll still have it opened and on standby in case I need inspiration or a well-structured vocabulary analysis.
Do you use ChatGPT in your lesson planning? If so, what do you use it for? If not, why not?
