Hello, my Dear Reader!
I am really excited to share my first task for Current Issues in Teaching course with you. Like I explained in my previous post, this year our tasks are based on preparing lesson plans and teaching materials. The first task was something I was really interested in since the moment I saw it on the syllabus: an AI-enhanced corpus-based teaching material. You know from last term’s posts that I have a love&hate kind of relationship with AI. I wish we never had AI. I don’t think humanity needed it, per se. On the other hand, we are where we are and since we can never go back, what else I can do other than making sure both my students and I are using it for improving ourselves?
I am yapping about AI again (the concept of AI turns me into a 19th-century pensive man) but our focus was mostly on Corpora. We were tasked to create a lesson plan using the ASSURE model and a teaching material using the Corpus-based language pedagogy. Our students are expected to engage with corpora and AI tools to deduce meanings or rules from the concordance data.
My lovely groupmates Buse Beyaz, Elena Çetinkaya, Melis Açıkkaya, and I chose to focus on the difference between mustn’t and don’t have to since it is a subject that usually causes confusion in learners and is suitable for inductive learning. We used Canva to prepare a digital worksheet and chose SKELL and ChatGPT for corpora and GenAI tools. Our worksheet tests students’ background knowledge, gives them a hands-on SKELL task for inductive learning and an AI task for getting feedback, and provides practice and production exercises.
Creating this task was an enjoyable experience overall. No, maybe I should have said it could have been an enjoyable experience. The timing of this task was… terrible. We had midterms and two different rapport submissions the same week. We all were sleep-deprived, exhausted, and were having mental fog due to overload. Nevertheless, my groupmates and I worked well together and managed to find joy in it. We improved ourselves on corpora use and GenAI prompting. (ChatGPT helped us with the latter. It turns out it IS a skill to write good prompts). Also, this was a great experience for us to think out of the box. It was quite challenging to think in reverse and create something for inductive learning.
Lastly, I believe this activity would cause problems in real-life classrooms due to the time limitations and student behaviours. Unfortunately, in our country we have to follow a strict curriculum and we only have limited time to teach certain subjects. While I believe this activity would be helpful for learning, I am not sure it is realistically applicable. Also, students should be familiar with technology-based education and AI usage prior to this activity. Otherwise, they might take advantage of the teacher’s goodwill and not complete the worksheet themselves.
I think this was it! Thank you for reading. I am waiting for your comments on our worksheet.
