Speaker
Description
In this workshop, each practitioner will involve participants in exploring approaches and activities that bring together Pragmatics, generative AI, and language classroom practices.
Yukie Saito: In my part of this workshop, I will explain the challenges Japanese EFL students face in mastering pragmatically appropriate conversations using standard ELT textbooks. Then, I will introduce ChatGPT as an innovative tool to bridge this gap, focusing on conversational aspects typically difficult for Japanese learners, such as leave-taking, making, accepting, and refusing invitations, as well as giving and receiving compliments. Additionally, I will explain how we can create conversations involving different participants in various contexts. At the end of my part, participants will also have the opportunity to try to make conversations using ChatGPT.
Bradford Lee: Generative AI has the potential to serve as speaking partners for students outside the classroom in role play activities or discourse-completion tasks (DCT). We analyzed the suitability, variability, and pragmatic strategies that ChatGPT 3.5 employed under a range of scenarios. Its responses were generally pragmatically-suitable, though highly dependent on the amount of context provided. ChatGPT also displayed limited strategic variety and sometimes made inaccurate assumptions. We will discuss common pitfalls in prompt composition and provide specific guidelines to get the most accurate responses from ChatGPT as a pragmatic instruction tool.
Jim Ronald: Situation-specific or speech act-specific “conversations” generated by ChatGPT are quick and easy to produce and, while they may contain factual or logical inaccuracies, they typically use English that is both grammatically correct and pragmatically appropriate. As such, they provide much that language textbooks and classrooms lack. Both as a consequence of their accuracy and their faults, these “conversations” provide opportunities for promoting critical thinking skills, pragmatic awareness, and fostering skillful users of the target language. In my part of the workshop, we will explore ways that this may be achieved.
| Keywords | pragmatics, speech acts, generative AI |
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