Title: Prompting applied to Grammatical Competence
Name of presenter: Sara Pérez Arroyo
Affiliation and academic title: University teacher at Aalto University Language centre.
Email address: saraperezarroyo@ucm.es
Keywords: Grammatical competence, Spanish past tenses, prompting, ChatGPT, LLM analysis.
Abstract:
This presentation explores the pedagogical application of prompting techniques to improve grammatical competence in students learning Spanish as a second language. The distinction between past tenses represents a significant challenge, generating insecurity and fossilized errors even at advanced levels.
This study presents a practical case conducted with students at a B2 level. These learners demonstrated the need to practice the use of past tenses more, due to persistent fossilized errors in some cases and the need to reinforce the ability to select among the past tenses.
The proposed activity combined the use of ChatGPT with a role change from learner to teacher. Students were asked to write three sentences challenging their peers to select the correct past tense, and the same task was suggested to the AI. The primary objective of this activity was to foster active learning, the “learning by doing” approach promoted by John Dewey.
Subsequently, all sentences were resolved in a group session, and the results generated by ChatGPT were compared with those produced by the students. The central questions of the study were: How could the LLM contribute to the development of grammatical competence in the use of Spanish past tenses? And, to what extent could the students and the AI achieve precise, innovative results with the same prompt?
The results indicated that the success of using a language model (LLM) in teaching depended significantly on the active intervention and supervision of the teacher and the implementation of challenge and self-assessment dynamics during the activity. Digital competence was also a key component, as it allowed students to interact with the technology and added a motivating element.