ELT in Brazil

My students are working on a project about the environment with another teacher and I’ve been tasked with providing language support classes to aid them in this work.

For today’s class, I wanted students (Ss) to work on reading comprehension of authentic articles about climate change and include a bit of digital literacy in the lesson.

Here’s the plan:

1. Ss find an article online about climate change
2. Ss use Chat.GPT to create multiple-choice questions about the text
3. Ss share text + questions with a peer
4. Ss read their peer’s text and answer the questions

Result:
Ss answered the questions in 5 minutes without even reading the articles. Why? Check a sample of this work below.

See the issue?

GPT is great at creating the questions quickly, but the distractors are poor.

Here’s a revised lesson plan:
1. Ss find an article online about climate change
2. Ss use Chat.GPT to create multiple-choice questions about the text
3. Ss enhance the distractors
3. Ss share text + questions with a peer
4. Ss read their peer’s text and answer the questions

It might be, I reckon, that teaching students how to edit and enhance text produced by AI will be a relevant skill for the future. But alas, who knows what the future holds?

“Ah, ora, se não sou eu quem mais vai decidir
O que é bom pra mim?
Dispenso a previsão” – Rodrigo Amarante