Since it was released about two years ago, ChatGPT has had a huge impact on our world and AI seems to improve every day. There are many rivals to ChatGPT, including Google’s Gemini and X’s Grok, so in this article I will talk about ChatGPT but the ideas can basically be applied to whichever one you prefer to use.

What I want to discuss is how you—as a teacher—can leverage ChatGPT to become better at your job. This is specifically designed for IELTS tutors but it can be applied to other types of language teaching.

Generating Study Materials

Ok. Let’s say you want to teach reading skills, perhaps to get your students ready for the IELTS reading test. You could find an article online… or you could make your own one using AI!

What are the benefits of making your own one? Well, you can pick a topic, a word count, and a language level that is suitable for your learners. You might be teaching your students vocabulary related to old age and you want to do some reading practice that fits in. Well, finding an article on Google is certainly possible, but it’s unlikely to be exactly what you want. You may also have to edit it for various reasons.

Instead of doing that, consider asking ChatGPT to write an essay. Give it a clear task and tailor it to your own needs. If you’ve been teaching the phrase “senior citizens,” then tell it to include that. This is a great way for your students to see language in context.

There are many other examples. Perhaps have it make an image for your students to discuss. You can tell it to produce a map so that you can practice IELTS writing task 1 map descriptions… or how about a line graph or bar chart? The possibilities are endless.

Vocabulary and Grammar Tests

I personally prefer to make my own teaching materials because I’m old-fashioned (and just plain old). Therefore, I don’t really like the idea of AI telling me what to teach and creating materials.

However, even I can get on board with the idea of having ChatGPT help me to create materials like these. For example, let’s say I want to teach my students the phrase “cause for concern.” This is a useful phrase to know and I could teach it myself with my own examples… but undoubtedly it’s quicker to say to ChatGPT:

  • Write 10 sentences that include the phrase “cause for concern.”

ChatGPT will generate ten sentences and I can then adapt these for my own teaching style. One way would be to simply remove the sentences I don’t like (because they’re too unnatural, inappropriate, or complicated) and then use them as examples to demonstrate the use and meaning of the phrase.

We can use similar prompts to produce sentences and then remove a word, leaving a blank for students to fill. For example:

  • Humans first went into ___ in the late 20th century.
  • She can’t find a parking ___ today.
  • There’s no ___ left in this cupboard.

I could tell ChatGPT to write a certain number of sentences using “space” and then blank them out so that my students could figure out the missing word!

I’m sure you can start to see that there are loads of possibilities. Again, this is about using technology to make your job easier. You shouldn’t be giving it the creative tasks or letting it teach for you. Instead, use it to do stuff quickly by giving it clear instructions so that it’s your new teaching assistant.

Marking Tests

I wouldn’t trust any AI program to mark an essay because I’ve tested dozens of them and they all failed badly… but you could certainly produce limited tests and have AI mark them instead of spending hours doing it by hand.

There are many ways to do this, of course. I would create a test (perhaps using ChatGPT as an assistant) and then send it digitally to my students. They could fill in the answers and send it back, and I would then have AI mark it and assign grades. It could even explain why each answer is wrong.

Just remember to supervise the program you use. These are far from perfect, even in a limited capacity. You still need human oversight to avoid embarrassing mistakes.

I suppose you could have it help you with essays but again I would caution that AI is nowhere near advanced enough to edit perfectly. It might, however, help you to catch certain obvious mistakes such as typos, grammatical problems, and illogical linking devices.

Generating Questions

Tell ChatGPT to look at old exam papers and generate new questions based on them. Tell it to copy the style and make new ones that are very similar. Again, you will really need to watch carefully and adjust for accuracy because the program will likely make mistakes, but even if you do have to edit it heavily, you will still save lots of time.

The easiest thing is to have it produce speaking questions. You can even make a whole IELTS speaking test using AI! Writing questions would be harder but they are definitely possible too. Try telling it a list of common writing topics and styles, then ask it to make new ones. You could even ask it to produce line graphs and bar charts to describe.

Further Ideas

To be honest, this article could go on for thousands of words, but what I think is best is that it gives you a few ideas and that you adapt these to your own needs.

Always keep in mind the limitations of the technology and the needs of your students. Aim to use ChatGPT to make your job easier but without getting lazy. You will have to check that it is doing the right things but if you use it right you can rid yourself of some boring work and give yourself more time for creative or meaningful tasks.

Other ideas:

Tell it to list useful vocabulary for your students or highlight common grammar problems. Ask it to test their reading comprehension or critique your ideas. It can even come up with lesson plans and handle administrative tasks!