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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – AI offers some excellent opportunities to enhance instruction for English Language Learners.
Other students? Not so much.
But ELLs are a different story, ranging from automatic feedback on pronunciation to practicing sentence construction with text-to-image and text-to-image AI tools.
A new study (it’s behind a paywall, but you can access and download it here) only involves a tiny number of students, but I think highlights an excellent way to use AI to help ELLs develop writing skills.
Basically, students begin to write, and then the AI tool offers limited options for them to select to continue the sentence. It’s sort of like a supercharged Google “Smart Compose” or Apple autocomplete.
The problem, however, is that the study authors built their own AI tool to use and, as far as I can tell, there are not many – or any – public tools out there that have the same capabilities. Most other AI tools just want to write the whole thing for you!
WordTune is the closest thing out there that I’ve been able to find, but it’s probably cost prohibitive for most of us.
I have written the study’s authors to see if they have any suggestions. They graciously replied:
You can find free to use text generator tools on Hugging Face, although
I think you and your students would have to create accounts to use them.
You and your students can even create your own text generators using
large language models and Python code — I taught my high school
students in Hong Kong to do so.
Here is a simple explanation about the text generation task from Hugging
Face: https://huggingface.co/tasks/text-generation
Unfortunately, of course, just about every school district content filter blocks Hugging Face.
I’ve reviewed all the tools on The Best Online Tools That Can Help Students Write An Essay list, and Word Tune was the only one that came close. Let me know if you think I missed something.
I’m adding this info to THE BEST POSTS ABOUT USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH ELLS.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – AI offers some excellent opportunities to enhance instruction for English Language Learners. Other students? Not so much. But ELLs are a different story, ranging from automatic feedback on pronunciation to practicing sentence construction with text-to-image and text-to-image AI tools. A new study (it’s behind AI, ESL Web Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
