Can AI tools like chatGPT help you as you practice for the CELPIP or work on your skills in English in general?

In short, yes!

AI can significantly assist you in working on and improving your writing skills, especially as you prepare for the CELPIP exam, but it won't do all the work for you.

While AI tools can help generate ideas, provide quick summaries, and offer feedback on your writing, you still need to refine and personalize the finished product to make sure it reflects your voice and style.

Being specific in your prompts to AI will lead to better results, as the more detailed your instructions, the more tailored the feedback will be.

Remember that real learning occurs when you actively use the language and receive instant feedback from interactions, not just from studying rules. Embrace AI as a helpful resource, but continue to apply your growing knowledge and expertise to develop your writing skills fully.

Takeaways:

• AI can assist with writing tasks, but it won't produce perfect results every time.
• Being specific in your prompts to AI tools often yields better and more relevant responses.
• Real learning occurs when you actively use the language, not just study it in isolation.
• AI tools can help summarize content, but you still need to refine the output yourself.
• Feedback from real interactions helps improve your language skills more than AI can.
• Experimenting with AI can enhance your writing process, but it requires your personal touch.

Links referenced in this episode:

• Get friendly, encouraging human support to help you prepare for the writing section of the CELPIP exam -join my 4 week writing program today! celpipsuccess.com/writing
• Using chatGPT to Prepare for the CELPIP - from the Official CELPIP YouTube channel.

I feel like everywhere I turn I see or hear something about AI. I bet you have too. It does seem to be everywhere, doesn't it? Have you tried using it?

I have made some limited attempts to use AI and have had some good experiences with it. The most common ways that I've used it has actually been with this podcast.

The hosting company where my podcast files live has some pretty powerful AI tools in the service they provide.

It helps me with things like the transcript of each episode, as well as locating keywords and writing while helping me to write summaries of what I've been talking about in here with you. It makes writing a lot faster and often helps me come up with new ideas to explore as I'm preparing for future episodes.

But I have found something to be true, and many others who would likely consider themselves to be power users of AI say the same thing, that AI is helpful, but but it won't get you all the way there. And in today's episode we'll take a quick look at what that means and how, if at all, AI could help you practice your writing skills for the celpip.

Well, hello there and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly podcast.

This is the podcast for motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the self abuse.

I also love to feature encouraging interviews with regular people, people just like you who are working towards becoming fluent in the world so we can learn from their experiences together. Who am I? My name is Aaron Nelson and I've English teacher for over 17 years.

I'm also a certified CELPIP trainer and I now help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes. If you're just joining us today, thank you so much for taking a chance on this program and for downloading this episode and for listening.

I hope that you find great value out of what I'm about to share with you today and that you'll come back again next week.

I do publish a new episode every Tuesday and you are welcome to come in and sit back and relax and listen to the episode, look back over my archives and listen to whatever you find to be of interest. I hope that there's something in there that you would be interested in.

Anyway, you are welcome to be here if this is your first time and if you're a longtime listener.

Hey my friend, I'm so glad that you're here that you're taking a little bit of time out of your day to pop me into your your earbuds or your cell phone or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts, these. Yeah, I'm grateful that you are here too. It makes my day that you keep showing up.

So I'm recording this episode on my phone in the parking lot while I'm waiting for my wife to do some things at her work. She asked me if I could come by and give her a hand. Well, not give her a hand, but help her to drive, to get to where she needed to go.

And of course, I. I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk with you today just to take advantage of the time and hopefully the audio won't sound so horrible.

I'm here talking on my phone. That's not my normal way of doing it.

I don't have a mic, I don't have the normal tools that I'm using to do what I'm doing, but I'm just here trying to see if I can take advantage of the time a little bit. And so I'm trying to help my wife get something done.

And that kind of moves or transitions into what I'm talking about today, which is all about using AI to help you as you are trying to get your celpip prep done. And you're probably thinking, I don't see much of a connection between AI and helping your wife with something that she needs to get done.

And maybe there's not that great of a connection because I just thought of it right now as I was speaking with you. So if it totally falls apart, this connection, then I do apologize. But this is what I think you'll get out of it. AI won't be able to do everything.

Like I'm not in there where my wife is doing what she's doing. Only she can do that. I just helped her to get to where she needed to go quicker. And that's kind of my take on using AI.

So I'm going to dig into that a little bit with you today.

So, like I said in my intro, I've used AI for a few things over the past few months to try to help me with some writing related tasks, things like transcripts, as I mentioned before, some summaries of podcast episodes, for example.

And what I found along the way is that the results I get are, like I said, part of the way there, with there being the goal I had in mind originally when I started working with it.

Yes, the AI tools I've used help me move a lot faster with some things, but I still need to go back and do a lot of fine tuning and correction and sometimes Rewriting before I am happy with the finished product. So I don't. Let me rephrase that. So it does save time sometimes.

When I say sometimes, it means even though it helps me get a project done quick, quicker, that part's fast. The part that kind of slows me down is that I have to go through and often do a lot of editing to make it sound better or more like me.

And I'll get into that in a minute. And it does help me.

Using AI tools like ChatGPT, for example, does help me come up with some good ideas, but it doesn't put out a perfect finished product.

And that's really important for you to have in mind if you're considering using tools like ChatGPT or, you know, AI in general to help you with your practice, to help you working on your English skills. It's not going to be a perfect finished product. So you need to know that that is true. It still gets my style of writing wrong.

Often the finished product doesn't sound how I write things. It doesn't sound like how I would word things. It uses words or phrases that just aren't my way. They're not my style. That's not my voice.

So while it does come up with a lot of information quickly, it does do a kind of a good job of summarizing content. For example, listening to my podcast and then helping me summarize what I've been talking about. It does throw that those kinds of things out quickly.

But I often need to go in there and do a lot of reworking of what it has built for me. Like the words are wrong or I would never use a certain word or phrase the way that it is using a word or a phrase.

So that is kind of what's going on when, I mean when I say that, that it doesn't come out sounding like my voice. So it is helpful. It's just not perfect. And that got me to thinking, could AI help you as you're practicing your writing skills?

And I found a great webinar, actually that you might want to check out if you haven't already. And it's by the folks@CELPIP CA. It's on their official YouTube channel and I'll be linking out to it in my show notes today.

But if you're curious about using AI and how it can help you and what to be aware of when it comes to developing your English skills, I highly recommend that you check out that webinar. You might find a lot of helpful tips and strategies to help you maybe begin experimenting with this tool.

What I focused on when I was doing some experimentation with this was on a writing task. And their portion of the webinar that I really paid attention to was around where on the, on the Celpip California webinar.

They did feature a little bit of work around writing prompts. Like how you could ask AI to help you to check your writing. And I will, in the link that I'm sharing.

I'm going to try, I'm not sure if it will work this way, but on YouTube you can, you can save a link so that it begins playing the video at a certain point in that video.

So I'm going to try linking out to that in my show notes today so that you can just jump right into the writing part if that's what you were wanting to focus on. But anyway, here are my takeaways from watching that segment of, of the video.

Number one, it's really, really important that you be specific when you're writing your prompts. And I found this out to be true in general as I've practiced or experimented, not practiced, experimented using AI.

The more my requests are, the better responses I get. Again, not perfect, but better. Number two, remember, always remember.

And they've said, they said this many times in the video, in the webinar that you learn the most when you use the language, not when you, you know, are studying it, not when you are reading up on it.

Like if you're, if you decide to ask chat GPT to give you like detailed explanations around grammar, it will probably give you a lot of information and to some extent that is helpful. But you don't really develop your language skills until you actually start using it.

And as you begin using it, you begin getting real time feedback from other people.

You know, you're putting sentences together and you're putting it out there into the real world and then you're watching people's reactions to your words.

Like if their faces look like they have, you know, they look at you weird, like you just said something really funny or totally mispronounced certain things. You'll get that instant feedback right? And that's how you can, that's how you begin to grow and develop and notice that something was right.

Like you get what you were trying to achieve or that something wasn't exactly right.

You get that instant feedback that, you know, book, like studying books and books of rules and grammar and things like that that won't give you that kind of instant feedback which we all need so much, which you need so much. You know, there's, there's. Yes, it is helpful to do some work with books and learning, you know, grammar rules and whatnot.

But the real, real learning happens when you are trying to use what you are learning about. And that comes out quite a bit in the webinar just around.

Don't hide behind the grammar rules that ChatGPT can throw your way or to help you to summarize or to create. Don't think that that's learning is what I'm getting at.

Having information is helpful, but it's not really going to do anything for you until you start putting it into practice. And the other thing that I learned from that webinar was actually how to construct or how to write the prompt.

And again, if you've never experimented with AI before a prompt, it's kind of like the instructions that you give it to help you to do something. And the more specific that prompt, the better your responses will be with AI.

And the thing that I learned in that webinar, which I thought was really interesting, was when you create your grammar correction prompt, like if you, if you take a block of text that you've written yourself and you Want to ask ChatGPT to help you find mistakes, here's how you can do that, how you can prompt it, how you can ask it to do that for you. You would write your prompt, you would say, please check my. The following sentences for grammar mistakes. Maybe that will be your prompt.

And then after your prompt, after your instruction, end it with a colon. You know what a colon is? It's those two dots that kind of sit on top of each other at the end of a sentence. And so that's a colon. It's not a period.

It's like two little periods that, that sit on top of each other. That's a colon. So you would write your, your prompt and then end it with, not with a period, but with a colon.

And then use a space, hit your spacebar once, and then paste in your block of text.

So just as a refresher, because I realized that got really nerdy really fast, what you want to do is write a prompt like, please check this block of text and help me, help me to find any grammar mistakes that I have made. And then you will put a colon at the end of that prompt, and then a space. And then you would paste in your block of text and then press enter.

And then ChatGPT will do its thing. It will analyze your text and it will begin highlighting for you the different grammar mistakes that you might have made.

And as I was, you know, fiddling around or experimenting with it, here's my writing prompt and feel free to use it if you want. Again, it's all about experimentation and trying to, to find a way to get it to help you the most. So what I wrote was this.

Please correct my grammar and explain my mistakes and tell me how many words I wrote because I was curious if it would be able to tell me how many words I wrote. Just because, you know, on the exam, on the CELPIP exam, your whole objective is around a certain amount of words.

So your minimum requirement is 150 and your maximum requirement are 200 words. So you don't want to go below that or above that.

And I realize that most word documents or word processors, not word documents, most word processors these days have word count features that you can turn on. So, you know, asking ChatGPT to count the number of words that you are writing might be a, an unnecessary instruction.

So don't feel like you need to do that. You can use your, your own word processor, word processors word count feature to help you with that.

I just thought I'd throw it in to see if it would do it, and it does. So again, my prompt was please correct my grammar and explain my mistakes and tell me how many words I wrote.

Then I followed that by a colon, a space, and then I pasted in my block of text. And that part about explaining what I did wrong, that part is really important. You might need to do a little bit of fine tuning on that.

One of the things that I noticed on my initial attempts with this was that the explanations were kind of helpful, but it was kind of complicated.

It was using a lot of big, long explanations about grammar that may or may not be useful to you, depending on your experience levels, using grammar rules.

So I tried fiddling with that part of my prompt and instead of having it be please explain my mistakes, I changed it so that the prompt would be please rewrite my corrections so a beginner or an intermediate English learner could understand it. And you can, you know, fiddle with that to your preferences.

Like if you are an intermediate level English speaker, you could say, please explain these, these mistakes to me in a way that would make sense or in a, in a way that an intermediate level English learner would be able to understand them. You see what I mean? You can try to adjust how the AI tool feeds information back to you.

So I encourage you to experiment with what you include in that prompt because I think that the more you, you experiment with it, the the better your response will be. Having said that, this is what you need to be paying attention to when you get your responses.

Number one, make sure that the corrections that Chat GPT offers you actually sounds how you talk or how you write. Don't let the tool radically transform your writing with unnatural sounding words that are far too complex.

I think you're going to find that happening the most. That's how I found my usage of ChatGPT and other AI tools.

That's how I've experienced it the most, where I would ask for help with something and the the finished product that comes back to me. It's just filled with words that I would never use and it just doesn't sound like my style.

So you need to be aware of that because it will probably happen to you as well.

Some new words, some new words are fine as long as you are willing to try to use those new words in your own conversations, in your own writing style as you go forward. Right, because it's always good to learn new vocabulary words, but you just have to make it yours.

So yeah, you just want it to sound natural is what I'm getting at. And also keep in mind that ChatGPT won't come with you on the exam. You still need to develop your writing skills.

This is just a way for you to get some maybe limited feedback on your writing. But don't overly rely on it because remember, answers won't be perfect and will for sure not be 100% you.

You still need to apply your own growing knowledge and expertise to what you're being offered with chat GPT's responses. In other words, just because AI suggests suggests it, it doesn't mean it's accurate or the way that it should be.

So always double check and this is still part way there. Like I said at the very beginning, you still need you.

AI is not going to be able to take over and completely transform your writing, your speaking, your abilities in English. It's just not going to do it. You still need to show up just like what I did here with my wife.

Circling back to the very beginning of this crazy little chat here with you. I only got could get her partway there. She had to go and do what only she could do. And that's how I think AI works these days.

It can help you to get to where you're going part of the way, but it's not going to be able to take you the full complete and do everything for you. Having said all that, I encourage you to go and Give this a try if you haven't already. It's free, you don't have to pay anything for it.

Just, you know, open up Chat GBT and start practicing with it.

Use some of your writing samples, paste it in there, ask it to help you with your with your any grammar mistakes that it can find or any spelling or any vocabulary suggestions.

Play with your prompts or your instructions that you ask the tool to do and see if it can provide you with some helpful ideas or another way of looking at what you're doing. As long as you remember it's only going to be taking you part of the way there.

And my friend, would you like to have friendly and encouraging human feedback on your writing work as you prepare for this help of exam? Then come and join me on our four week writing program that will help you with writing tasks that you might encounter on the exam.

What students love about it so far who have been working with me is that you are able to work 100% at your own pace when you have time, when you have space to do it. You turn in your writing when you are ready to.

And they also love the personal and friendly feedback that I give often with video so that I can show you where you're doing great and where you can improve and how. Four weeks practicing writing tasks you'll experience on the exam plus friendly support to help you fine to your work.

If you would like to get in on that, please go to celpipsuccess.com writing thank you so very much for listening today and I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas and I hope that you and your family are filled with with great peace and joy in this holiday season. God bless you and I am looking forward to seeing you in the next episode. Have a great day. Bye.