An experience on the use of ChatGPT as an educational tool for creating primary EFL classroom materials and activities: pre-service teachers’ perceptions and experts’ opinions

Abstract

The present study was conducted in a Teaching Faculty in Spain to answer the following question: Can ChatGPT assist teachers in creating pedagogical proposals and produce practical educational activities/materials? The experiment involved a total of 121 third-grade students enrolled in a foreign language teaching (FLT) course, who were required to create communicative (CLT) activities and materials for a flipped classroom (FC) lesson using ChatGPT as an assistant and then record the commands fed. Later, they answered a questionnaire (1-10 scale) on the usefulness of the tool and the modifications they made to the proposal generated by ChatGPT. Additionally, students evaluated whether the tool could substitute for the teacher's job and whether they would use it in their future teaching. The questionnaire also included open questions on the pros and cons of using the tool along with some ethical issues regarding authorship. Statistical tests and qualitative analyses were performed on the data. Finally, the students' creations' appropriateness and practicality were measured by an experts' committee. Results suggest that ChatGPT may be a useful tool for material design and lesson planning, although potential problems regarding authorship and pedagogical issues were identified both by the participant students and the expert evaluators, as we will explain later on. In what follows, we will review existing literature on the use of artificial intelligence and its benefits for education, examples of experiences with ChatGPT and issues related to plagiarism. We will then present the objectives and methodology followed for the present study. Besides, results will be described and discussed, as well as some conclusions derived from the findings.