THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING AI-BASED DIGITAL ASSISTANTS FOR DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY SKILLS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING

ABSTRACT

This report sheds light on a rapid-spreading theme of using AI based assistants for boosting students’ vocabulary skills and makes an analyses of use and efficiency of digital AI-assistances in organization students’ lexical skill. Informing about the importance of using AI in study, increasing number of AI assistance tool in terms of learning English language.

Keywords: AI, students, vocabulary, lexical, assistance, tool.

Education is the most powerful system we have for increasing social mobility, unlocking potential, and improving lives. A tool that can help with this has enormous implications. Plus, students and learners are already using AI for direct help. Teaching them how to do it responsibly may alleviate some of the negative implications of our AI moment, and make it a great assistance of learning process.

AI has the potential to transform and accelerate your learning. It become a talented tutor for everyone, and it is known widely with help of this research that was conducted by Ben Ward,Deepshikha Bhati,Fnu Neha, and Angela Guercio. The research found that AI enhances academic performance study efficiency but. There is a huge chance that students are not using it in a prudent ,proper way.[1, p. 3]

AI is good at doing things. We ask it to do things, write report, summarize a paper. It’s useful but the more we ask it to do for us the less we end up doing for ourselves but that’s no good because It’s the doing where we learn wouldn’t get a personal trainer to run round a track for you and expect that to have any benefit, so instead students can use it as a trainer get it to challenge and guide them.

Before start using AI in this way we have to remember that it can get things wrong, so always be critical in your evaluation of its output.

Study after study has shown that retrieval practice is the most effective form of learning. We cannot make ourselves remember by trying to remember. You do remember by interacting with the information you want to learn and that also helps your understanding however you use AI you have to make sure that you utilize that getting artificial intelligence to force you to think about something and test you is a much better strategy, and it works with how our brain like to learn.

7 approaches for students with prompts

In the paper, Dr. Ethan Mollick and Dr. Lilach Mollick (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania & Wharton Interactive) actually discuss seven different ways to use AI in classrooms: AI-tutor, for increasing knowledge, AI-coach for increasing metacognition, AI-mentor to provide balanced, ongoing feedback, AI-teammate to increase collaborative intelligence, AI-tool for extending student performance, AI-simulator to help with practice, and AI-student to check for understanding.[2, p. 1]

Picture1. Seven approaches for students with prompts

So you have to prompt Chat GPT to test you. There are a lot of ways to do it, but lets start with a “Socratic questioning». It is a good way to find out where the weakness in students understandings is on a particular subject or theme. It is actually a style of Oxford admission interview where they ask you questions that they do not expect you to know the answers to, and they will guide you through to an answer. The reason they do that is to see how you think about something. [3, p. 1]

For example: Learning the word ‘Reluctant’. Students can go with a question ‘What does reluctant mean? By using AI and Socratic approach it will ask you something like: ‘Have you ever wanted to avoid errands even though you knew you had to do it? How did you feel in that situation? If a person agrees to do something but does not really want to do it, would they be hesitant or confident? And then student have to give the answer to AI so it would continuous with “Now, look at this sentence she was reluctant to speak in front of the everyone. Does she seem eager or hesitant to speak? –Hesitant. So AI assistant will continue to explain and help to understand the word by saying: Based on these clues, what do you think reluctant means? Student will think that it is about do not want to do something and give the answer to AI assistant/ If the answer is decent and correct it will proceed with offers to male up own examples with using the word reluctant, and then it provides some advice or even rate your level of understanding.

Ask Chat gpt to provide multi-level explanations for you. So first as if you are explaining to a child and then a high schooled and then an academic explanation and then you do the same thing and write it in chat GPT and ask it to assess how it thinks you have done.

For example: The idea of chat gpt is always to challenge the learner. The best here is application of Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. First it is starts off remember and then understand and then apply and then evaluate and create.

Picture 2. Bloom’s taxonomy

Students could even ask Chat-gpt to that, to create a sort of challenges to enable them to do that it is like student has his or her own personal trainer where they are being challenged to fathom that’s what makes the difference. This is the reason why Oxford still uses this.

Another benefit of learning with implementation of AI is that there is no embarrassment. For that we can use widely known case. Imagine full class of a students and there is a concept that the rest of the class understands but one student. This might make that one student feel real embarrassed to put a hand up, to ask the teacher of explanation. But with an AI you do not have to feel or do that. You can proceed and ask it just to keep on explaining and re-explaining and you finally understand it. [4, p. 1]

It can also help students with reading and learning new words, and leaners have to be careful with this one. Because if you just ask to summarize something or put it in bullet form which is quite good but sometimes misses things out. It could prevent students from developing that skill and understanding new lexical material, and also they won’t know what it’s missed out. Better way of doing it is for learners to summarize the paper and pull out the key concept. And then ask chat gpt or whichever AI assistant do the same, and then there would be differences.

In order to understand what you are reading you can ask those platforms to explain the concept in a easy way, highlight the lexical part and send it to chat gpt to elaborate on that. So it is feels like having own tutor which is generally helpful.

In conclusion it is safe to say that it is a great way using AI in order to increase lexical parts and vocabulary understanding, and also implementation of artificial intelligence tools and assistance such as Chat GPT. AI-powered digital assistants have significant potential to support learning process of students. Therefore, the implementation of these tools into language education can be assumed as a promising approach to improving students’ lexical skills in the modern environment.

References:

1. Ox.ac.uk/ ‘Generative AI tools’. https://www.ox.ac.uk/
2. Oneusefulthing.org/ ‘Assigning AI: Seven Ways of Using AI in Class’. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/
3. Ox.ac.uk https://www.ox.ac.uk/
4. 4.https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/DisplayAbstractSearch.cfm