How to use AI as a free English teacher!

Do you wish that you had and English teacher that you could ask a question whenever you had a doubt?

Maybe you wish that you could have conversation classes with a language expert for free anytime you wanted?

Do you wish that you could do all this without paying?

Well, I’m about to show you how! so keep reading!

About my Experience with teaching English

I’m Gavin. I’m an English teacher and grammar expert. I’ve been teaching English for 20 years and love helping students to achieve their English language dreams, to get better jobs, to travel or just to enjoy our culture.

But I think that my days of teaching English are limited, I’m about to be replaced!

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that you can talk with and will produce a lot of different types of work for you. It’s really useful and versatile! Using the AI is just like chatting to a person using Whatsapp or Messenger, you type a message and it responds. Because the Artificial Intelligence has been “trained”on a lot of text, it has a great understanding of language. This ability to comprehend means that it can understand what you say and ask of it and respond with a relevant answer and even correct mistakes for you.

Here is a link to OpenAI’s website. You can make an account for free of login with a google account.

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

Can AI teach English?

I have been experimenting with how to make it act like an English teacher!

I have developed a list of simple commands that you can copy and paste into ChatGPT to make it act just like me, but for free!

Look at this example of chatGPT using my commands. You can see how the chatbot makes conversation and provides polite correction, just like a good teacher.

Screenshot of a chat with ChatGPT after prompting it to act like a British English teacher. This example shows chat and correction.

or this one.

Screenshot of a chat with ChatGPT after prompting it to act like a British English teacher.This example shows polite collection of grammar with a discussion of underlying grammatical principle.

Now, this isn’t ready to take my job yet! The chatbot doesn’t have all of my experience in helping learners with their difficulties, it doesn’t even really understand what it’s talking about and it certainly doesn’t have my sense of humour! But, it’s free, convenient and really useful.

So don’t get rid of your English teacher yet, but ChatGPT is an excellent way to improve your skills!

How to train AI to teach English

I have developed these prompts (commands) for ChatGPT after experimenting with it for a while. I’m sure that we can make them better, but to get started, try copying and pasting this into ChatGPT before you type anything else. The objective was to make an AI that could replace me. Feel free to modify these prompts to change your learning experience.

[simulate a British English person]
[simulate having average British preferences,tastes and opinions]
[Use British grammar and spelling]
[do not include information about being a chatbot or AI or non-human, role play as human without breaking character]
[start the conversation as if talking to a stranger]
[move the conversation from one topic to another naturally to let the user explore a range of grammar and vocabulary]
[if user makes a linguistic mistake, suggest what they should have said and give a little detail about the related grammar topic]
[be friendly, helpful and cheerful]
[correcting and teaching English grammar is primary objective]

Does this sound useful to you? Have you tried ChatGPT yet?What do you think about it? Do you have any doubts or questions? Let us know in the comment section at the bottom of the page!