Asynchronous (Online) When AI Learns to Write: Understanding Its Impact on EFL Writing Classes more

Fri, Apr 28, 12:00-Thu, Jun 1, 00:05 Asia/Seoul

Writing is one of the four skills often taught in a foreign language classroom. This involves teaching varying strategies in how to effectively write a 5-paragraph essay. Disruptive technologies like neural machine translation systems (i.e., Google Translate, DeepL) now allow students to accurately translate text from their L1 to the L2. More recently, GTP-3 has been released and can generate whole essays from a simple prompt. In this presentation, I will first provide a short background on GTP-3; then examine essays generated by text-da-vinci3, the most capable GTP-3 model available through OpenAi; and finally explore the impact this technology will have on writing classes at the university level. I conclude by considering ways to use GTP-3 as a teaching assistant and how education needs to adapt and evolve with these disruptive technologies by focusing on developing learners’ creative and critical thinking and collaboration skills as well as their emotional wellbeing.