The Role of AI in English Language Instruction

Hi everyone. I'm Jennifer from English with Jennifer. I have a very special opportunity for you. If you're learning English, I invite you to listen to a recent conversation I had with another ESL educator. See how well you understand. You'll have the chance to listen to two very different but clear accents, American and British. I'll help by sharing some vocabulary notes. If you're a teacher, I invite you to listen to our discussion about AI and language instruction. There are different viewpoints, and my guest and I share ours. My guest is Alina, a fellow English teacher and the product visionary at Twi, a company that offers AI-powered tools to English teachers. Hey Alina. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me here. How are you doing? Pretty good, pretty good. I'm just so excited because I love meeting other teachers. I think it's pretty easy to find common ground right away because we share the same passion. But I also know that we have different stories, like the way we've entered the profession and how our careers have unfolded. I just wanted to ask if you could share briefly, what's your ESL story? What kind of teaching experience have you done in the past? Yeah, absolutely. So before I joined Twi, I was working as a teacher at university. I taught different courses related to ESL and EFL, general English, academic English, phonetics, different theoretical courses about language teaching. So I was pretty much in academia. I was doing research. And I also gave private lessons as well for around 10 years before I joined Twi. It's similar. I've done the traditional classroom experience. I've done one-on-one, face-to-face. That's how I started, meeting people in person one-on-one. Then I moved into the classroom setting. So I have that experience, but I've been online for quite some time now. Some people ask me, do you miss it? And so that's a question I have for you. Do you miss the classroom teaching? Yeah, I do. Especially here at Twi, I talk a lot with teachers who are using the platform. And when I talk to them and when they tell their stories about how they taught this and that, and everything about the classroom, the students that they have, I realize I do miss it quite a bit. Right. But you have the experience to tap into. And I think it's also important to keep up by talking to other teachers who are still actively in the classroom. That's good. I'm active, just in a different way, online. But I think, correct me if I'm wrong, you recently attended IETFL. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was in the UK for the IETFL this year in Brighton. It was amazing. I met so many people, teachers, school admins, people who are involved in EFL somehow, publishers. It was amazing. We had so many great conversations. Right. I have not been to IETFL. It's one of my hopes for the future to check it out and see how it compares to the TESOL convention, which I usually go to every year. So I went to the TESOL convention in Tampa, Florida. But I think the one thing that is similar is that probably both conventions had a hot topic, AI. And so there are a lot of sessions in Florida on AI, chatGBT, et cetera, et cetera. So you can see that there are people in our profession who are excited. They're embracing it. They're teaching others about the possibilities. There are people like me who I can't say I'm an expert, but I'm familiar. I'm familiar with the technology. I've been using it. I'm learning more. And that there's still a camp, I think, that's hesitant and they're kind of resisting the technology. And I wanted you to address that. Like, why do you think some ESL professionals, ESL, EFL or language teachers in general, are hesitant and resistant when it comes to AI technology in our profession? Well, that's a great question. I really want to share something that I have learned from conversations with different teachers at IETFL. Most teachers I've noticed are reluctant to try using AI just because they don't trust it. They have heard about AI and, you know, with all this hype around AI, they also tried chatGBT. They tried it to create some exercises that they have been creating by themselves for years. And it didn't work because, you know, either they didn't prompt it correctly or just, you know, the chat didn't know how to do it at that point. So they were disappointed and they stopped trusting it. And, I mean, that's fair because I've seen also another reason. A lot of companies who market the AI tools as something that can replace teachers. And, of course, I mean, it's scary. If a tool is marketed as something that can replace a teacher, you know, this teacher doesn't want to use it. So, of course, teachers see that and many of them believe this can happen and they are just afraid. And, you know, there are also ethical concerns, especially with school teachers, because some teachers have tried using chatGBT and other AI tools, and they have seen wrong or, you know, dangerous information. And they don't want to introduce it in the classroom quite yet. You know, another thing, maybe this is the last one, is that teachers just don't have the time to explore. You know, they're so busy because you and I probably know that teaching is not just, you know, teaching in the classroom, it's also preparing materials, assessing, you know, all that. So maybe they're just overwhelmed. They see so many AI tools on the market. They want to try them, but, you know, with so much work, they just don't have the time. So it's not that they don't want to. It's just that they haven't been able to yet. Right, right. And I think some of those fears and concerns were addressed, especially at TESOL. And I appreciated the open discussions that we had through the different sessions, and I've been blogging about it to digest it further and hopefully continue the discussion, that it doesn't have to be a threat or a replacement. It's something that can enhance our teaching. So you're not asking it to do your work for you. You're collaborating with it. So that's number one. Number two, it's easy to fear what we don't understand. And if you take the time to learn, you can control it, master it, and then it works to your benefit. So, okay, it didn't work. Again, you mentioned prompt. You have to learn how to craft the prompts. This is a new skill that everyone has to develop if you want to work with CHAT GPT or any AI tool. How do you work with it? There's always a learning curve. It just doesn't produce miracles right away. And as you said, the technology will only develop and get better, but it doesn't have to be a replacement for us. It's something that we can use to enhance our instruction. I personally still love to create things, you know, for certain projects, but there are times where I'm like, wow, this is great because it saves me time for that exercise. Because this doesn't need to be a masterpiece. It just needs to be a piece of instruction. And then I can push my creative juices somewhere else where I really want it to be. So I think that's important to acknowledge. How did you get involved in AI? Because you came from the classroom and this path then led you to AI. You know, it's a great question. The thing is, I don't really understand. I was doing research and I liked it, but at some point I just realized, you know, I need a new challenge. And so I started looking into how I could transition into high tech. And I had this amazing opportunity to join a team that was just starting to build a product where I thought I could, you know, share my expertise and experience. And it just worked out. And I've been here for a couple of years and it's amazing. So it just it was a very smooth transition. And you said correctly that teachers have to learn how to work with AI. And I've been learning, too, because, you know, I have a lot of teaching experience. But when I came here, I didn't have a lot of experience with AI. And so all this time I've been learning and learning and learning and I really enjoy it. I think that's what we need to do is like we have to remember that we are learners, always learning, whether we're learning more about grammar, learning new words like, oh, I didn't know that expression. Right. I have I work closely with this one student who's based in the UK and I'm always picking up new British expressions. I'm learning. I'm like, wow, I didn't know that difference. So, you know, so whether it's language or technology, I think that's part of the excitement, but also part of our responsibility to grow and learn. So I think I can totally understand the appeal of learning something so new. But so we talked about why people might be resistant. How do you see AI benefiting us as teachers? How can AI work for us? Oh, wow, there is so, so much, so much to say. One of the things you have already mentioned, it's outsourcing some of the tasks. So I just mentioned before how overworked some teachers are. And, you know, AI can help take this load off their shoulders, basically. Teachers have mundane and repetitive tasks, too. So if you can trust AI to do that for you, I mean, like, you know, creating templates and some, you know, working with some management issues, emails, some types of assessment, et cetera, AI can do all that. And that can free up some time for you as a teacher to create because teachers love to create. You know, if you can spend more time creating exercises for your students, that's that's great. And another thing that I think AI can help with is creation of materials itself because, you know, it takes so much time. Like if you take, for example, video and you want to create a listening exercise, you need to watch the video. You need to create the questions, create the answers, create, you know, a lead in activity, some follow up exercises. With AI, it can be done much faster. So you can, you know, you have a lot of ideas and you can turn much more of them to life, basically, with AI. And that's great. And it's not only, you know, video content and text content, by the way. Now AI can create images and videos. And so exciting because we can have so many different types of new teaching materials. It's amazing. It's amazing for different types of listening. And I mean, it's great. And it also boosts students engagement because in their private lives, they use their phones and they are so used to this bite sized content on like Instagram and TikTok. And when in the class they are asked to work with a paper textbook, you know, sometimes they're not as engaged and as happy to do it. But if AI can change that as well for us and make the students more engaged, why not? You know, amazing. And I can go on and on. Personalization. Oh, you know, we used to have one textbook for the whole class. Now you can take a text and you can create a different level of exercises for it. That's great for mixed ability classrooms. Also, you know, so many people are working right now on AI tutors, personalized assistants. That's also coming out very soon. So, you know, there are so many possibilities. And the great thing about AI is, you know, you and I sitting here, we can't even imagine what can happen in the next six months or a year. So teachers can benefit a lot. These are the things that I see that I've seen so far. But there are many more, I'm sure. And it partly depends on our willingness, but also our creativity also is going to bring it out. I just blogged about a teacher, Susan Gare, who's very creative with all technology. She had this lesson on plastics and the dangers of plastics. And she turned to the different AI tools. She generated a rap like that about the dangers of plastic, beware of plastics. And then she generated a song like that. And it was like, wow, you got the vocabulary. And it was such an engaging format. She got the words, she got the music, generated images. And there's your whole package. I mean, wow. Like it really is so creative, saves you time, but also produces things that you previously thought, wow, how would I ever get that? And as you mentioned personalization, I've turned to chat GPT with vocabulary. And maybe it could even be similar GRE words. But I would contextualize it differently for different private students because one's an engineer. Another person's might be in real estate. Another person is running a small business. So I might take the words and ask chat GPT to help me create a short little paragraph like that, but for different people. Then my job as the teacher is to continue. We read it aloud. We do pronunciation. We do discussion. We do all the production. Things that chat GPT would not be able to do. So, again, I see it as a collaboration. It's really fun. But tell me specifically then Twi. Some people have heard you talk about Twi and they don't know what you're referring to. What is Twi and what does it do and what does it offer teachers? Yeah, so Twi is an AI platform that we created specifically for language teachers. And it allows you to create lesson content for your class. You simply paste a link to a video or a topic for your lesson or a list of vocabulary and Twi can generate all sorts of exercises matched to different skills. Listening, speaking, writing, reading, you know, multiple choice activities, open questions, fill in the gap, creative exercises for speaking, essay topics, whatnot. So, you can literally build a unique lesson from scratch just like you mentioned. You have different students who have different interests and you can, in minutes, create different lesson plans for them. I mean, this is amazing. And what makes Twi different from ChatGPT is that Twi reduces this learning leap for the teacher, you know, by providing the most intuitive design where you just click, you paste your link and you click one button. You have everything as opposed to having to craft this prompt and interact with the chat to make it give you what you want. And another thing that I really wanted to mention that I'm sure many language teachers will appreciate is that we built Twi in connection with CFR. So, everything is aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. You have all your levels from A1 to C2 and we really put a lot of effort into ensuring that the content produced by Twi could be matched to levels. And that makes it great for working with mixed ability classrooms and, you know, basically any type of teaching English tutoring as well because, you know, everyone uses the levels. Yeah, and then when you create the lesson plan on Twi, you can download it as a PDF, you can export it to Google Forms. We're now working on making Twi interactive and the future students will be able to, you know, do the interactive exercises straight on the platform. The teacher will just share the link to the lesson and the student will choose the correct answers or, you know, type in an essay or voice report an answer to a discussion question. And then the teacher will be able to get all that together with AI-assisted feedback if they want to use AI to provide feedback, of course. And yeah, so that's Twi. Amazing. So, again, to clarify, it is like ChatGPT, but it's specifically for the teachers. And, again, it's aligned with the levels. So, you don't have to worry, am I writing the right prompt? Am I going to generate, am I have to regenerate three, four times to get something that is usable? Or, again, Twi cuts that down to one result that works from the get-go. Yeah, of course, you know, if you need to, you can regenerate certain texts on Twi as well, but you don't have to do it. And it doesn't have the chat interface where you have to interact with AI. It's something that teachers are more used to. You put in the information and you get the result. Exciting. So, you touched upon this, but what is your vision, whether it's for Twi or something larger? What do you see happening for us as teachers in the next, let's say, five years? That's a great question. Or what do you hope? Yeah, I'm trying to be positive. I do think that AI will change education, especially EFL in particular, which interests us. And I know that a lot of teachers will be listening to us. So, I don't want to say, you know, that AI will replace teachers, but AI will find its way into EFL teaching. But the teachers will stay. We will collaborate with AI. We will try to make the most out of AI. And we will become better teachers. We'll become super teachers, I think. And, you know, while our generation is more used to human tutors, and I think they will keep choosing human tutors because they want human interaction. Younger generation who are, you know, they're using TikTok and they prefer to interact with AI, they will maybe opt for some AI solutions. It's great to have a choice. But, you know, a lot of people will still be taught by humans, but these humans will be different, will be different teachers. And as I worked at university that provided teacher training, I just wanted to mention that teacher training will have to change as well. You know, the things that teach future teachers will have to include AI into the curriculum. And this has to happen fast because AI is developing at this crazy speed, you know. And with schools as well, look at it. They have to come up with all sorts of regulations of, you know, on how to use AI in the classrooms. There is a lot of work to be done in different areas and research as well, by the way. But, you know, it's just so, so exciting. So I'm looking into the future with excitement. It's a great time to be alive. It is, and we can be a part of it. We don't have to be on the sidelines watching it develop as, you know, can be a part of it and shape it together. I also had heard, like this viewpoint that I'd heard and I share it, is that I don't see the threat from technology that it will replace us. I heard someone say that it's not that we're going to be replaced by AI. So people who worry about being replaced and losing their job should worry more about a competitor who knows how to use AI. So the idea is you want to inform yourself. You want to get comfortable and skilled at this because it's going to be part of your toolkit. It'll be part of your skill set. So you want to embrace this and allow it to enhance your teaching. Yeah, we have to keep learning. Exactly. Super. Thank you so much, Alina. I really enjoyed talking with you about AI and TWE. And hopefully we'll get a chance to talk further again in the future. But thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I hope you found my conversation with Alina interesting and useful. As for the teachers watching, I invite you to check out TWE for yourself and see how it can become part of your teaching and language instruction. I'll put the link in the video description. That's all for now. Please remember to like the video and share it with anyone you know who has interest in how AI is being used in English language instruction. As always, thanks for watching and happy studies! And happy teaching! Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, X and Patreon. And don't forget to subscribe here on YouTube. Turn on those notifications.