Improving English with GenAI

Conversation practice

Practice is key to improving your spoken English.

When you’re having a conversation in an additional language, you may feel unsure about your grammar or choice of words. You may also want to improve your fluency or use some of the new vocabulary you've been learning. The best way to build these skills is to practise real time conversation often and in a range of contexts.

Of course, GenAI can’t practise for you, but it can provide additional opportunities to work on your conversation skills over time. For example, you can:

• Practise having a conversation
  • Prompt: “Act as a fellow university student and have a conversation with me about [topic].”
• Adjust the conversation to suit your language level
  • Prompt: “Adjust the level of language and sentence structure used in the conversation to match my current language level.”
• Get feedback on your conversation skills
  • Prompt: “During our conversation, give me feedback on my grammatical error patterns. Provide examples and explanations to help me improve.”

Feedback on your language

Identifying your most common error patterns allows you to continually improve your language skills.

Noticing mistakes in your own writing and conversation can be difficult. However, once you are aware of errors, you will be able to identify common patterns and address the problems with targeted study or practice.

Some ways that you can use GenAI as a tool in this process could be to:

• Free write for 10 minutes and ask GenAI for feedback
  • Prompt: “Review this sample writing for grammatical errors. Identify my three most common error types. Include examples and explain the grammar rules.”
• Convert your handwriting to text
  • Prompt: “Convert this handwriting to text. Identify the errors in sentence structure. Based on my error types, recommend one aspect of language I should focus on improving this week.”
• Identify errors in your speech patterns
  • Prompt: “Analyse my speech for sentence structure and grammatical accuracy. Give me feedback on my speech and recommend specific ways I can improve.”

Asking GenAI for feedback on free writing or casual speech practice allows you to improve your skills while maintaining the integrity of your assessments and preventing GenAI from adding your assessed work to its data set.

Vocabulary and grammar

At university, you’re constantly being exposed to new vocabulary and sentence structures.  

Seeing or hearing new words and sentence structures in context helps you to remember and use them correctly. No matter which language you are learning, you can improve your skills using strategies to actively learn new words or grammar rules.

Gen AI can help in this process if you ask it to:

• Explain the meaning of new words
  • Prompt: “Explain what [slang term] means. Explain it simply so that an 8-year-old would understand.”
• Provide examples
  • Prompt: “Provide five examples of [new sentence structure] in use.”
• Incorporate new words into practice conversation
  • Prompt: “Incorporate [new idiom] into our interactions to help me practise.”
• Create quizzes
  • Prompt: “Create a quiz to test me on [new grammatical structure].”
• Create images
  • Prompt: “Create an image that represents [new vocabulary] to help me remember it.”

Gamifying your language learning

Language learning takes time. Being rewarded for your progress can increase your sense of achievement and your motivation to continue.

One way to boost your motivation and engagement while you learn is to apply gaming strategies to the study techniques you use. This might involve using things like point scoring and rewards to motivate you to keep going.

You can get GenAI to gamify your language learning by asking it to:

• Reward you for improvement
  • Prompt: “Create a point system and allocate points every time I use [grammatical structure] correctly.”
• Reward you for task completion
  • Prompt: “Create a quiz to test me on my understanding of [grammar rule] and allocate points every time I get a question right.
• Level up your skills
  • Prompt: “Create a series of language levels. Identify my current language level and reward me by levelling up every time I reach a new level.”

Final tip

All graduates from the University of Melbourne are expected to have strong communication skills. Using GenAI tools to help you improve your English language skills, rather than relying on tools to translate for you, will set you up for success at university and beyond.