Leveraging GenAI for Online Lessons: Level Up your Vocabulary Game

If you're like me, you're always on the lookout for ways to make lesson planning ‘smarter’. AI tools can be hugely effective at this … but isn’t AI inaccessible and daunting? I thought so, too, until I mastered some simple strategies!

In this article, I will share how I used GenAI to create targeted vocabulary lists for different learning objectives.

What is GenAI?

Generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, is a technology that uses human language prompts to generate video, images, and text. Educators are among those embracing and exploring how to best leverage this powerful tool to elevate student engagement on their journey to mastering essential language skills.

As an assistant with a high degree of customization, GenAI can help educators brainstorm ideas for course design, lesson planning, and even materials development.

Tailored Lessons Powered by GenAI

Recently, I received two requests for ‘custom’ lessons. One student wanted to role-play a business English conversation, and the other wanted to sharpen his pronunciation. Knowing how important my vocabulary choices would be for each lesson, I wanted to tailor each student's targeted vocabulary list for maximum relevance, usefulness, and student engagement. Naturally, I turned to GenAI.

Goals for Targeted Vocabulary

Topic-based vocabulary lists strengthen self-expression. For language students, studying a group of words and phrases about a specific subject makes for efficient learning. Whereas one IT professional may be expected to understand jargon for cloud computing, for instance, their colleague who works with a fleet of physical machines must be articulate in a different lexicon.

Considering my student who wanted to practice business conversation strategies, targeted vocabulary lists based on a topic would be the most enriching way to level up their proficiency. For my pronunciation student, I understood that the curation of their targeted vocabulary lists needed to pull from the phonetic differences between their L1 and English.

Generating Customized Vocabulary Lists

Generating customized vocabulary lists with GenAI is simple. Just enter a prompt into the GenAI app, then refine the results by adjusting your prompts.

To improve consistency, keep related prompts in one thread, like I did for my business conversation and pronunciation students. Here are some initial prompts I used for each:

• What top 10 key words and/or phrases are necessary for understanding contract details?
• Please give me five tongue twisters for a Chinese-speaking ESL student who wants to improve voiced and voiceless sounds.

Refining and Personalizing Vocabulary Lists: GenAI Re-Prompting

After reading GenAI’s targeted list of contract details, and seeing how the app formatted two tongue twisters under auto-selected minimal pairs, I entered the following after each of its responses:

• Can you please modify the list for an intermediate English language learner?
• Please give me five minimal pairs of words for the following voiced and voiceless sounds: /p/ and /t/, /b/ and /d/, /f/ and /v/, /s/ and /z/, and /k/ and /g/.

Bringing GenAI to Life: Crafting Lessons That Inspire and Engage

Of course, how I planned my lessons around these lists was as important as the lists themselves. But overall, I was impressed with the fast delivery of my new teaching assistant.

Now it’s your turn! Open up your favorite GenAI app and let the prompts above inspire you to develop your own materials to boost your students’ vocabulary, pronunciation, and confidence.

Sources:

Chao, Yuen Ren. Mandarin Primer (1949). An Intensive Course in Spoken Chinese.

Han, Weifeng (2016). The Acquisition of English Voicing Contrast by Chinese Learners.

Wang, Qian (2018). Perception of English Plosive Consonants by Chinese Learners.

Learn more about EF Teach Online here.