Interaction, Design, and Assessment: An Exploratory Study on ChatGPT in Language Education

The launch of the revolutionary Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool named ChatGPT has raised several concerns in various fields, including language education. Despite critical perspectives and even prohibitions within some countries, regions and communities, ChatGPT is expected to remain a prominent presence. Many researchers have attempted to utilise ChatGPT to support teaching and learning and discover its potentialities as well as limits. However, due to its recent release, little is known about how ChatGPT can be utilised, to what extent ChatGPT is useful for educators and students and affects students’ critical thinking skills. The present exploratory study examines the usefulness of ChatGPT in creating and assessing Task-Based Language Learning (TBLL) activities designed by the student teachers, the extent to which ChatGPT affects student teachers’ critical thinking skills and the ways student teachers interact with ChatGPT. To investigate these research areas, a mixed-method approach was applied. After having analysed the data gathered from an online questionnaire, online interviews, interactions with ChatGPT, TBLL activities, a self-study, ChatGPT- generated feedback and a self-made feedback text, various considerable insights emerged from the results. First, evidence confirmed that student teachers could design the same or a better quality TBLL activity and save time with the help of ChatGPT. Second, findings revealed that about half of the participants copied the outputs given by the AI tool to perform the TBLL activity. Third, findings disclosed that ChatGPT was not able to create a detailed rubric for assessing student teachers’ TBLL activities, but it could generate good-quality feedback by giving it a rubric in the prompt. Fourth, the results showed that ChatGPT allowed educators to save time in elaborating feedback. Based on the findings obtained, some possible solutions as well as proposals for future research in the realm of ChatGPT applied to language education have been formulated.