AI for Language Learning: ChatGPT and the Future of ELT

On the last day of November 2022, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab, launched ChatGPT into the world, and launched an avalanche of concern, curiosity, fear, and hope all at once. For those who haven’t been watching, ChatGPT is a chatbot that generates incredibly sophisticated responses to pretty much any question or statement you feed to it.

Need a cover letter explaining why you’re a great candidate for that elite graduate program? Done. Need a five paragraph essay about the development of the subway system in New York City? Done. Oh yeah, in MLA format? Done and done. How might this kind of open source technology affect language teaching and learning?

Let’s take a look at a segment of that subway essay:

Prompt: Write a five paragraph essay about the development of the subway system in New York City in MLA format Response: The development of the subway system in New York City has played a significant role in the city's growth and development over the past century. The first subway line, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), was opened in 1904, and it quickly became a popular form of transportation for both locals and tourists. In the following decades, the subway system expanded rapidly, with new lines and stations being added to serve the growing population. One of the key factors in the development of the subway system was the need to alleviate congestion on the city's streets. As the population of New York City grew in the early 20th century, the streets became increasingly congested with streetcars, buses, and automobiles. The subway provided an alternative mode of transportation that could carry large numbers of people quickly and efficiently. It also allowed for the expansion of the city beyond its crowded downtown area, as new subway lines were built to serve the outer boroughs. In the decades following the opening of the IRT, the subway system continued to evolve and expand. In 1940, the city's three major subway companies, the IRT, the Brooklyn…

My Prompt: Write a five paragraph essay about the development of the subway system in New York City in MLA format

ChatGPT Response: The development of the subway system in New York City has played a significant role in the city’s growth and development over the past century. The first subway line, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), was opened in 1904, and it quickly became a popular form of transportation for both locals and tourists. In the following decades, the subway system expanded rapidly, with new lines and stations being added to serve the growing population.

One of the key factors in the development of the subway system was the need to alleviate congestion on the city’s streets. As the population of New York City grew in the early 20th century, the streets became increasingly congested with streetcars, buses, and automobiles. The subway provided an alternative mode of transportation that could carry large numbers of people quickly and efficiently. It also allowed for the expansion of the city beyond its crowded downtown area, as new subway lines were built to serve the outer boroughs.

In the decades following the opening of the IRT, the subway system continued to evolve and expand. In 1940, the city’s three major subway companies, the IRT, the Brooklyn…

For many teachers (including me!), the first response right out of the gate was some serious hand-wringing. After all, if we believe that writing is the best way to refine and develop our thinking, what will happen if we no longer need to write? Will thinking soon disappear? It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole, but today I’d like to look up to the sky and imagine some possibilities.

And what better way to imagine some of the possibilities than to ask ChatGPT itself how we can use it to help multilingual learners of English. Below are some of ChatGPTs suggestions when I asked it how it can be used to help English language learners:

My Prompt: How can ChatGPT be used to help English Language Learners?

ChatGPT Response: There are several ways that ChatGPT can be used to help English Language Learners

First, ChatGPT can be used as a tool to practice speaking and listening skills. ELLs can have conversations with ChatGPT, which will respond with appropriate responses based on the input it receives. This can help ELLs become more comfortable speaking in English and improve their pronunciation and vocabulary.

My first thought on reading this response was “I got you! ChatGPT doesn’t have speech recognition!” but upon pressing (by asking for clarification), ChatGPT suggested that you can use pretty much any device with a microphone to transcribe your spoken English into the prompt box. Once the responses are generated, students can use screen reading software to verbalize the response. So here, ChatGPT is partially correct. While students may still have to deal with technology that doesn’t recognize their answers in speaking and listening, it will give them responses that can handily simulate a conversation, allowing for a tireless, fluent companion that students can practice with.

ChatGPT Reponse (continued): Second, ChatGPT can be used as a writing assistance tool. ELLs can use ChatGPT to generate ideas and receive feedback on their writing. ChatGPT can also provide grammar and spelling assistance, which can be particularly helpful for ELLs who are still learning the rules of the English language.

This is a big one. Many teachers have already become accepting (sometimes reluctantly) of the fact that students will use tools like Grammarly to support their writing. Like it or not, ChatGPT can give students many of the same responses that I would have given to them. Let’s look at some of the feedback it gave when I plugged in a recent student written paragraph and asked it to check the grammar:

Overall, your grammar in the paragraph is good. However, there are a few minor mistakes and areas for improvement. Here are some suggestions: • "Right after the exploration stage comes to the frustration stage" should be "Right after the exploration stage comes the frustration stage." • "With everything settling down" is a bit ambiguous. Consider revising this phrase to be more specific about what is settling down. • "Because whenever having a conversation" should be "Because whenever you have a conversation." • "Now I understand that it's really hard to have a conversation if only one side is willing to talk" should be "Now I understand that it's really hard to have a conversation if only one person is willing to talk." • Consider revising the phrase "the nightmare is going to end soon" to be more specific about what the "nightmare" is and how it is ending.

If my goal as a teacher is to help students learn, then should I withhold access to the same information until the timing is convenient for me? Some teachers might look at this and ask if they’re even relevant anymore. I would suggest that the answer is yes, but our focus will shift on helping students develop even deeper critical thinking skills in English. Less motivated teachers who just want to teach grammar may be weeded out over time, but those who are ready to take deeper dives will get the opportunity to mentor students on their path to becoming confident and autonomous English users.

ChatGPT Reponse (continued): Third, ChatGPT can be used as a way to expose ELLs to different types of language and discourse. ChatGPT can generate responses in a variety of styles and genres, such as formal and informal language, which can help ELLs become more proficient in using appropriate language for different situations.

Imagine the opportunity to turn nonacademic, informal content that is high interest and directly focused on any given student into an accessible i+1 level reading. Last year, I wrote about ways to create your own leveled readers, but with the release of ChatGPT, this can be fine tuned. Take a look at the following two examples. First, a simplification of a paragraph from the New York Times, then an “upgrading” of a simple paragraph from Time for Kids.

My Prompt: Rewrite the following paragraph so a sixth grader can understand it: A good adaptation is not one that shows total fealty to the original source material. A good adaptation, instead, is one that chooses and changes with an eye toward the essence of that material. Luchino Visconti’s 1963 adaptation of “The Leopard” by the Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is not faithful to every beat of the 1958 novel. But it captures its essence: the story of a changing society and those soon-to-be-left-behind as relics of a dead world.

ChatGPT Reponse: An adaptation is when a story is changed into a different form, like a movie or TV show. A good adaptation is not just a copy of the original story, but it keeps the most important parts and changes other parts to make it work better in the new form. For example, the movie “The Leopard” from 1963 is based on a book from 1958, but it doesn’t follow every detail of the book. Instead, it keeps the main idea of the story, which is about a society that is changing and people who are left behind.

My Prompt: Rewrite the following paragraph so it is appropriate for a 12th grader: I don’t know how they do ski slopes or other kinds of racing courses. In football, there’s a grid and there are certain distances, and the field is a certain size. The wonderful thing about golf course architecture is that it’s ever-changing.

ChatGPT Response: I am not sure how ski slopes or other types of racing courses are designed. In football, the field is set up in a specific way with a grid and certain distances. However, one of the great things about golf course architecture is that it is always changing and adapting.

These are only brief examples I asked ChatGPT off the top of my head. With time and experience, both teachers and students will start to discover the ways they can hone in on building specific skills, reduce time wasted on content that doesn’t engage students, and learn and understand language concepts that have traditionally been evasive in the English language classroom.

Without a doubt, there are going to be problems with plagiarism and ghost writing, and there will be many who will simply throw up their hands and proclaim that they don’t need to study anymore, because look what ChatGPT can do! As teachers, it will be our responsibility to help students see not only what this type of AI can do for them, but what unimaginable futures it can build with them.


The conversation around ChatGPT and similar technologies is only in its infancy. This post is only meant to open the conversation, and opinions, thoughts, concerns, and possibilities will only increase as awareness builds. We also cracked the door on the conversation over on the DIESOL podcast with my cohost, Ixchell Reyes, and professor Eric H Roth in Episode 76. I encourage everyone to join in on this conversation as we are at ground zero, and we have the opportunity to shape the future of education here!

About Brent Warner

Brent Warner
Brent Warner is a professor of ESL at Irvine Valley College in California, and an educational technology enthusiast. He is co-host of the DIESOL podcast, the only podcast with a specific focus on EdTech in ESL. He frequently presents on the crossroads of technology and language learning, focusing on student engagement and developing learner autonomy. Brent likes his coffee black and his oranges orange. He can be found on Twitter at @BrentGWarner
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12 Responses to
AI for Language Learning: ChatGPT and the Future of ELT

  1. Hidayatullah khan says:

    Amazing for language development but has several flaws in some issues.

  2. María Alejandra Giacalone says:

    Hello Brent! How are you? I’m currently teaching ESL Business English at a software company. I would very much like to read your article in class to elicit discussion if you agree because most of my students are interested in AI. Thank you! 🙂

    • Brent Warner Brent Warner says:

      Hi María,

      I apologize for the delayed reply! Yes, please share! I hope you get some good conversations and interesting ideas from your students about how they might use it in the future. I’d love to hear how it turns out!

  3. Kate Mastruserio Reynolds says:

    Hi Brent,
    Thank you for the great article and the positive perspective.

    During all the melee I came across this article https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/ai-writing-detection-tool-homework-students?fbclid=IwAR2JB_UaCfezaBJeEJDS7Gk3p5SgLKFxXCsuNM30UwElD4brvgtKNtyltFM

    I think you will like it.

    • Brent Warner Brent Warner says:

      Thank you, Kate!

      I’ve been keeping a close eye on the AI Detection programs. Unfortunately, GPTZero told me “Your text is likely to be written entirely by a human” when I plugged in text generated directly from ChatGPT. The question of detecting AI is going to be a BIG conversation coming up, and there’s a lot of uncertainty because many of these are both off-base and unclear about how they’re coming to their conclusions.

      I made a little doc here that may be of interest to you as I track the responses of different detectors:
      https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U6Ej9wIC0TdmUCn6_jtz6kZz-bja1wRCP6IyhFqaacE/edit?usp=sharing

      More to come!!

  4. Great article that gets at some of the ways we can use Machine Learning (I prefer ML to “AI”, because the machines / chat programs are NOT intelligent) in ESOL teaching.

    The one big issue right now – and perhaps for a while yet – is that ChatGPT is happy to make up information. When students are asking for help with their English, or just looking to chat for practice, factual inaccuracies are probably not a significant issue. But, when students use it to help understand a concept, students will need to be much more careful (distrustful, even?), and teachers will have to be more involved.

    I’m in K-12 ESOL in the USA. I’m considering working with content teachers to develop i+1 readings (as you discuss in your post). My role will be to tweak the English for our learners. The content teacher’s role will be to ensure the accuracy of the text, as well as judge how will it covers the content area objectives. Thanks to ChatGPT (or similar), we will likely be able to create several high-quality, i+1 readings a week, easily. Differentiation just got a lot easier.

    BTW, I’ve heard humans & machines working together referred to as “centaurs”. I think that centaurs are going to be a common, and very useful, system going forward.

    • Brent Warner Brent Warner says:

      Thanks, Chris! I left out the ML conversation for brevity, but you’re right!

      We may find issues with the factuality, too, as many teachers prefer to have students personalize their writing as a way to engage with content, but then there’s less likelihood that the content needs (or can be proven) to be “factually right”. There are a lot of fine details, nuances, and exceptions that we’ll have to get used to.

      Centaur is an interesting terminology choice – it seems to be pretty well established in the CS world, and I agree that it will probably be considered common, even if it’s not the phrasing I would have chosen😅

    • Razmik Badalyan says:

      ChatGPT can cite sources and, somewhat, clarify what part of the text they used (if you include the text in the prompt). These do not solve the issue, but it’s something.

      Chris, I’d love to see what you will create with ChatGPT. Do you have a newsletter or something where I can follow your work?

  5. Peter says:

    As “foreign language teachers” our job is to facilitate the acquisition, learning, and eventual study of the target language. AI can help but only on a supplemental level. The processes of successful acquisition and learning are absolute. Judging whether a student is genuinely able to express “themself” is easily done via an oral assessment, and if need be by a reading and writing exercise.

    • Brent Warner Brent Warner says:

      Thank you, Peter. This brings up an interesting argument about whether writing will continue to be valued as the primary medium for recording thoughts. With quick and easy access to audio and video recordings, perhaps the ability to write and read well will become less important to some learners? I can certainly see it happening in small pockets, already.

      It’s also worth noting that many people consider public speaking to be one of their greatest fears (statistically, still one of the highest fears, I believe), so we have to be careful that we don’t judge all students’ ability to speak well as an absolute or sometimes even accurate reflection on their abilities in English.

      Regardless, all worthwhile considerations!

      • Hey Guys,
        ☆Awesome blog post☆ and ☆replies☆ with very creative prompts, ideas and mini-exercises/experiments with this amazing tool!

        I’ve been playing with it like you guys and have similarly positive ideas! I am into language teaching at tertiary level and I am also a certified Learning Advisor (LA), where we use Intentional Reflective Dialogue, IRD, (Kato & Mynard, 2016) to guide learners to explore and discover their unique ways of learning and build autonomy in the meantime. As an LA, my responsibility in a dialogue is, therefore, mainly asking powerful, reflection-eliciting questions, not providing direct answers/solutions or suggestions to learner questions or issues such as, “I cannot maintain my motivation to study.” And because I use samples of such dialogues in my training as a learning advisor educator, I’ve tested ChatGPT to see if it can structure this sort of a reflection-generating dialogue, when guided appropriately, and the result was again quite good; you can find part of it as a linkedin post on my wall (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hatice-karaaslan-ab76035).

        Again, as an EFL instructor, I have designed a whole 15-week, B2-level English for Life Curriculum course using ChatGPT, us becoming “centaurs.” Part of it is also available on my wall. I’m also into Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) pedagogies and I’m designing a SEL- and case-based 15-module student mentorship training and 7-minute video contents for each using ChatGPT. In all, I do quite some tailoring and adaptation.

        Students, at any level, can do the same with ChatGPT or approach their play with ChatGPT from a similar perspective, and hope they can become quite fluent in these skills before they graduate as the future of job market will demand them.

        Thank you very much for this space to share my perspective as well.

        • Brent Warner Brent Warner says:

          Thank you for sharing, Hatice!

          This is all very cool, and I’m glad to see you are getting good use of ChatGPT. I think the tailoring part of the conversation is going to become more important, too. There will be a lot of people who will start using these bots to kickstart their work, then fine tune from there. This is great in a lot of ways, but I can see critics noting the possibility that if we all start our ideas with ChatGPT, we may lose creativity or options for variety as the starting point can influence our end goal.

          My guess is this is going to be a never ending academic debate, but we should have some really interesting classroom discussions throughout it all!

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