Talk by Prof. Ana T. Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools by students has upended our approaches to university teaching and assessment. This presentation advocates for the mindful exploration of AI tools by inverting the power dynamics of standard university research assignments.
Prof. Ana T. Pérez-Leroux from the University of Toronto will discuss a project from one of her Spanish Descriptive Grammar courses, where students were tasked with using ChatGPT to complete an assignment and then assess the tool’s responses. She will discuss the logic of the approach, the results, and the student experience.
Full presentation description:
Students in a Spanish Descriptive Grammar course were presented with an assignment aimed at discovering the linguistic characteristics of generic reference in Spanish; that is, sentences where the subject refers to kinds rather than specific entities, and/or the predicate denotes habitual/characterizing situations (Los leones son carnívoros ‘lions are carnivorous’). Students were assigned to one of three themes: 1) the use of determiners in generic noun phrases; 2) the role of tenses in generic references, where there is a satisfactory although more limited research literature, and 3) the effect of subject realization in generic reference. The answers could be easily discovered using fairly standard intuitional tools of syntactic research, but differed in the amount of accessible research, from extensive treatments in the linguistic literature comparing English and the Romance languages and in the second language acquisition literature (1), to some research available (2). For the last topic, there is no specific work treating the topic. Students were invited to use ChatGPT to solve the grammar assignment, and subsequently trained on the topic of generic language in English. In the final step, the student teams were asked to assess (and give a mark to) the response developed with the ChatGPT tool. In this presentation, I discuss the logic of the approach , the results, and student experience.
RSVP:
Questions? Contact Dr. Ramón (Arturo) Victoriano-Martinez (arturo.victoriano@ubc.ca).
