Annals of the University of Oradea: Economic Science (Dec 2024)
NEW ROLE FOR THE TEACHER: PREVENT STUDENTS FROM COMPLETELY ABANDONING THEMSELVES TO AI AND RELINQUISHING CONTROL OVER THEIR LEARNING. Illustration for foreign languages for specific purposes
Abstract
In the field of education, and especially in the field of foreign language teaching, AI seems to be the realm of all possibilities. In the absence of a welldefined framework, control is easily lost. The teachers are hesitant, because they still don't know, most of the time, where to start and where to end the AI in their activity. Students jump on the immediate benefits of smart devices because they don't know what they can or what they have to do to avoid turning themselves into AI terminals. In the context of the redefinition or annihilation of roles in education, the teacher has a new responsibility, in addition to those he has traditionally: he has to become an influential person giving warnings and preventing students from abandoning themselves to AI, relinquishing control over their learning and development. This desire can be achieved by the responsible introduction of AI in the educational process, through contrastive comparison, which allows an almost cinematic viewing. We will present in the article a typical situation for learning a foreign language in the university environment: a non-homogeneous class in terms of language level, motivation, or degree of attendance of the courses by the students. The activity proposed by the teacher is created from an action-type perspective and targets individual general skills, linguistic communication skills, language activities, fields, tasks, strategies, and texts. The teacher will introduce free chatbots (ChatGPT or similar) in a controlled way in the didactic course proposed for economics students learning business French. Creatively introducing AI into this course, before the students themselves do, powerfully establishes (a). the incalculable benefits of the use of AI by students, in terms of speed, number of variants generated, productions with a high level of language, the generation of suggestive images through free and high-performance applications, the creation or self-creation of evaluation exercises; (b). the double valence - positive and negative - of some aspects: respect and nuance of the workload, originality in the context of a large number of users, error correction, management in solving the assignments, emotional involvement; (c). the disadvantages about the inability to perform some work tasks, the deviations from the defined work task, the hallucinations produced, and the limitations in the context of a common collaborative activity platform. AI is a democratic tool, but, paradoxically, it is not for everyone.
Keywords
