AI for literacy: An introduction to teaching key vocabulary with ChatGPT
“Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively and make sense of the world. ... Lacking vital literacy skills holds a person back at every stage of their life.”
In this post, I discuss some of the ways that AI tools can help teachers to up their game in terms of literacy teaching. Some of the ideas are quite basic, while others will help teachers to begin to unlock the potential of AI to make their lessons more fun, more engaging, and more effective by playing to the natural strengths that ChatGPT as for playing around with natural language.
When ChatGPT burst onto the scene, perhaps the most incredible thing about it was its fluent, easy literacy. The AI model released by OpenAI has a way with words that is quicker, more broadly informed, and occasionally more effective than can be achieved by most humans. (It is also not without its downsides and weaknesses, as I previously discussed.) It is not surprising, then, that many teachers are finding ChatGPT and other AI tools remarkably effective tools for upping their literacy teaching game.
Literacy is for everybody
It is easy to think that teaching literacy doesn’t apply to you - that it isn’t your responsibility. Unless you teach a subject where literacy is front and centre, it isn’t always apparent just how important literacy is. But every subject requires students to read, to understand spoken instructions, to comprehend new vocabulary, and to speak clearly about the subject: These are all facets of literacy, so the importance of this vital skill really does extend to every single classroom.
How, then, can ChatGPT and other AI tools help a teacher in any subject to incorporate more explicit teaching of literacy in their lessons?
Unlocking key words
At its most basic, AI can help to do the legwork of generating lists of key words and phrases that students need to know for a particular topic or task. It can even generate matching definitions for each term.
This can be incredibly powerful on the fly, for example when providing students with a list of words they should include in their response to a question - or when getting started on internet research on a new topic. Here is a very basic example:
But much more is possible. As ChatGPT is at heart a ‘Large Language Model’ (LLM), its forte is playing around with words. You can:
ask for more examples of words with the same prefixes or suffixes
ask about word origins (etymology)
and even request a series of synonyms or antonyms for a key word
In other words, any of the basic techniques that you might use to explicitly familiarise students with key vocabulary, can be expedited by AI tools. But much more is possible, including some more interactive and engaging ways of implementing literacy in your lessons.
Making literacy fun
None of the methods discussed above are ground-breaking, but they are tried and tested ways of incorporating literacy into lessons. One of the keys to making vocabulary learning stick is to shake things up. Here is an example of a simple prompt that achieves that:
We can go farther though, by asking for something a bit more involved:
I’m no economics or history teacher, but those clues look a bit easy to me. Luckily, it’s a simple matter to ask ChatGPT to recalibrate by making them more difficult! I’ll leave it to you to decide where you need to pitch these things for your students: After all, at Teaching AI we believe that the point of bringing AI into the classroom isn’t to replace teachers - it’s to free up our time and upgrade our teaching.
Some of the other ways I have personally used ChatGPT to help me explicitly teach vocabulary are:
creating clues for a variation on the classic ‘Taboo’ game - giving students lists of words they are not allowed to say, as they try to explain a key term to a partner
generating lists of words with the same prefixes as a couple of key words in my lesson - so that students could consider the context in which each of those words is commonly used, and what the prefix might mean
writing content for a literacy-focused use of the Frayer Model - often used for key concepts, but also useful for particularly chunky or significant pieces of core vocabulary that students will keep coming back to
Upgrade your teaching of key vocabulary with Teaching AI
At Teaching AI, our mission is to make AI tools more accessible to teachers and students - to ensure that everybody can benefit from the use of AI in the classroom. Since launch we have had a couple of resource types that focus on literacy, including a Key Terms Glossary. available to everybody. Supporters also get the use of our Reading Comprehension resource type, which generates text for students to read as well as matching questions.
Today, we are pleased to announce four new resource types - one for everybody to use, and three for our Supporters:
Upgrade Your Lesson: Literacy Links (free to all) - Just put in a few details about your class, your course, and your lesson topic, and get suggestions for how you can incorporate literacy into your teaching.
Word and Definition Matching Lists (Supporters) - Input your key terms in the Lesson Topic box, and get a jumbled list of definitions which students can match up to the correct word. This also includes the answers, of course!
Taboo Word Lists (Supporters) - Use the Lesson Topic box to tell Teaching AI what key terms you would like your students to use as they play ‘taboo’, and in under a minute you will have a set of 5 banned words for each of your key terms.
Story Time (Supporters) - This is a direct response to requests from some of our Primary Teacher users! Just enter your lesson topic or theme, and Teaching AI will write you a short fictional story suitable for your students related to that topic. Bear in mind it’s up to you how fantastical or realistic you want it: We suggest you use the ‘additional instructions’ box to tell Teaching AI a bit more about exactly what you would like, for this option. See an example below!
Summing up
Whatever your subject, you should now be able to see that the opportunities for upgrading your teaching of literacy with AI tools like ChatGPT and Teaching AI are almost endless. You may want to try one or more of the ideas above, or you may want to have a go at asking ChatGPT to help you with planning your own preferred literacy teaching activity!
