Teaching English In Age Of AI

For the majority of my generation, the primary source of learning English as a foreign language or reading and understanding texts written in English used to be a teacher. Those of us who aspired to learn to speak and write in English followed the way our school and university teachers spoke and wrote. We learned to speak by hearing our teachers speak, even imitating their accents and pronunciation.  Many of us envied the columns of our university teachers and wished to write like them someday. 

Our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays, Tolstoy’s stories, Derrida’s complex theories, and British and American literary trends was shaped by the lectures of prominent figures in English academia or the books or guidebooks written by them (in pseudonyms or under their real names) at the time. Most teachers, who teach language and literature in high schools and undergraduate schools in Nepal at the moment, have had this experience. They are teaching the generation (in the metros and semi-metros) who do not need to solely rely on teachers for learning language and literature.

Learning via AI  

Much of the language and literature parts in grade XI and XII English, for example, are such that students can learn them via some AI tools or through Google or YouTube.  If they are smart enough, they no longer need the teacher for tips on how to write a paragraph, news reports and articles, letters, skeleton stories, emails, CVs, travelogues/memoirs, book/film reviews, press releases, and so on. If you provide the context and right cues to ChatGPT, it will give you well-written samples of these materials within seconds.  

One can do the same about the grammar rules—use of adjectives and adverbs, subject-verb agreement, prepositions, tense, relative clause, active/ passive voice, reported speech, phonetics, among others.  ChatGPT can provide reading materials (sometimes even more comprehensive and useful than a teacher could present within forty-five minutes of his class) for Tim Winton’s “Neighbours,” Kate Chopin’s “A Respectable Woman” Julia de Burgos’ “I Was My Own Route,” Ben Okri’s “The Awakening Age”, Bertrand Russell’s “Knowledge and Wisdom” and so on. 

Thus in one sense, the AI tools today are equivalent to what used to be Neema guess papers—a set of books which contained possible questions and their answers for nearly all subjects through intermediate to bachelor’s to Master’s degree courses which the students of my generation and the generation that followed relied on to pass the exams in the 1990s and up until 2000s. Nearly every university student would have one Neema guess paper tucked in the back pockets of their Levi’s jeans. 

How much the high school and undergraduate students of the Nepali metros still look for Neema guess papers is anyone’s guess, but AI tools are being accepted as teaching and learning aids globally. Debates on merits and demerits notwithstanding, there are calls, such as by the British Council, that teachers should be given training to experiment with AI, AI literacy should be at the core of learning, and be part of the curriculum from primary school to adult education. It has been found by the British Council research that English language teachers use AI-powered tools to create lesson material and to help learners practice English, to teach vocabulary, to help learners reduce grammatical errors, and to help them improve speaking, writing, and reading skills.

One would wish this for Nepal’s hills and hinterlands, where English teachers are not available in the first place, or where trained teachers are far and few between. If they could teach students English with more accuracy, and if AI tools could enable students to speak English correctly and with ease, that would be a real change. For teachers whose English is an acquired language and who learned their pronunciation from a dictionary, AI tools can be a support regarding how to teach phonetics or how to paraphrase Shakespeare’s sonnets. 

That said, one must be mindful that AI-assisted learning is not always flawless.  Most students who submit excellent works (which they later admit were generated by AI) have a lot of errors in them, and teachers have to point them out.  The difference becomes stark when you compare their original answers with those generated by AI tools. The latter may look more impressive but dull. The former may contain errors, but there is creativity, imagination, and insights because in it the students think, recall, reason, and rationalise. 

Navigating challenges

Teaching English today entails navigating a complex web of challenges. It includes an understanding of how AI functions on the part of the teachers–the awareness that AI makes mistakes and that students have to rely on original texts for understanding and their own creative and critical faculty for interpretation.  All this requires, on the part of the teachers, as I have argued in my previous columns, to be even more resourceful in terms of reading and understanding, including how AI functions in terms of language and literature, knowing how students are using and misusing it and how this will impact their learning and understanding.

Again, there is no one-size-fits-all in Nepal’s context. Digital divide has meant that the AI tools and what they can do is limited to urban youths, those with English school background in particular. There are schools without internet and there are schools, students and teachers without basics of AI. So what works for the metros does not work for the backwaters of the country.  But one thing is for sure: Without guidance and training to the teachers, and without guidance to students regarding how exactly they are supposed to use and trust AI, English teaching, or teaching of any subject for that matter, may be far less easy than may be thought.

(The author is a journalist and educator based in Kathmandu.)