2023-07-31 08:55:44
In an interview with EFE after having addressed this dilemma this week in Vigo at the LVII International Congress of the European Association of Teachers of Spanish, Domínguez, who last year won the Teaching Excellence Award, points out that he raised the workshop on ChatGPT and the language teaching in a session in which, first, he shared his knowledge of this tool with the teachers.
«In the field of language teaching, teachers are not very given to using technology, so I sensed that the attendees would have heard of ChatGPT, but would not have used it. First I explained to them what this computer resource is and I asked them if it could be an ally or a threat to the teachers in the face of the danger of substituting us», he indicates.
Later, they asked artificial intelligence the question of what use it can be for language teachers. He replied that to do vocabulary exercises, conversation, text creation, exams, proofreading…, but they verified that, in practice, he does not meet any of them.
“Conversing is not possible because its last update is from September 2021. So if you say:” Hello, how are you?
They put the AI to the test with other activities and there it did measure up. «We pretended to be students who are learning Spanish as a foreign language and we asked him questions in English. We asked him for an essay for the Spanish B1, but with some mistakes, and in three seconds he had it », she recounts.
Would a text like that have slipped into an exam? Yes, answers Domínguez emphatically. «Many teachers said that, that they will not be able to send texts to the students home because if they presented them with the ChatGPT text, they would consider it valid. Written expression tasks will have to be done in the classroom”, they concluded in the workshop held at the University of Vigo.
Another assignment for artificial intelligence was to present it with a text from an English speaker with errors so that it could correct it, give it a grade and give the correct version. In parallel, the teachers began the same task. The result is that, while the teachers were correcting, in the blink of an eye, ChatGPT had it corrected, with a grade and a good version.
Of course, in the qualification of the supposed student, only one teacher out of twenty agreed with the AI by giving it a five.
«For some things it can be useful because it provides resources in a very short time, but on the other hand it cannot provide us with as many resources as first we can think”, warns the researcher.
In addition, he clarifies that the specificity of the questions is key. “If you ask him about how the subjunctive can be studied, the answers are general and not useful for students,” she muses.
Remember that, in April, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, predicted that in about 18 months these artificial intelligences would have trained enough to start their transition and in two years they could begin to replace teachers. “Given the limitations it has, we think that this statement is daring,” says Domínguez.
“Right now ChatGPT is more of a useful resource than a threat, but I don’t know if when it’s further refined it could jeopardize the teaching profession. I think that more time is needed to replace the teacher », he estimates.
Some 130 teachers from more than twenty countries on different continents participated in the congress that was held this week in Vigo.
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