AI Tools for English Teachers

An AI chatbot is very good at producing a first draft of something formulaic, and very bad at knowing anything specific about your syllabus, your pupils or your examination. Almost every disappointment teachers report comes from asking it to do the second thing.

The useful division is this. Ask it for raw material you will then check - a passage at a certain level, twenty gap-fill items, six comprehension questions, a rubric - and it will save you thirty minutes. Ask it what the Grade 9 syllabus requires, or what came in last year's paper, and it will produce something that sounds authoritative and may be entirely invented.

• Good at: drafting a passage to a word count and level, generating many similar items, rewriting something at an easier level, producing a first rubric, listing ideas you will choose from.
• Poor at: anything about a specific national syllabus, a real examination paper, a circular, or what a particular textbook contains.
• Dangerous at: stating facts with confidence. It does not know when it is wrong, and it never sounds unsure.

Most weak results come from a prompt that leaves out the four things the tool cannot guess. Put all four in and the first answer is usually usable.

• Who it is for. Grade 7 learners of English as a second language in Sri Lanka produces something quite different from students.
• How long. Give a word count. Without one you will get something twice the length you wanted.
• What language it must contain. Use only the past simple and words a Grade 7 pupil would know is the instruction that makes the output usable.
• What it must not do. Do not use idioms. Do not use contractions. Do not include a title. Negative instructions are the ones teachers forget and they are often the most useful.
• Then ask for a second version. The second attempt, after you say what was wrong with the first, is almost always the one you keep.

These are the failures worth knowing in advance, because each one looks completely convincing on the page.

• It will invent syllabus content. Asked what Grade 9 covers, it will produce a plausible list that is not your syllabus. Use the Teachers' Guide for that, never a chatbot.
• It will invent examination questions and claim they are real. If it says something came in a past paper, assume it did not until you have seen the paper.
• It will invent circular numbers, dates and references. These look exactly like real ones. Check every one against the actual circular.
• It drifts above the level you asked for. A passage requested at Grade 6 will creep to Grade 8 by the third paragraph. Ask it to list any word above the level and it will usually catch its own drift.
• It writes in a register that is not ours. Output often reads as American, informal, or full of idioms a second-language learner has never met. Say so in the prompt.
• It cannot tell you what is in a book it has not been given. If you want work on a specific text, paste the passage in - as long as doing so does not breach the publisher's copyright.

Teachers who get value from these tools tend to use them in the same narrow way rather than for everything.

• Sunday evening: draft the week's reading passage and its questions, then spend the saved half-hour checking the level rather than writing from nothing.
• Before a test: generate twenty extra practice items of a type your class keeps getting wrong.
• When differentiating: produce the easier version of a worksheet you have already made, which is the job that otherwise never gets done.
• Never: for anything you will hand out without reading in full. That is where the embarrassing errors come from.