شیما قهاری

Education has evolved significantly over the centuries, ranging from the ancient and classical era to the Industrial Revolution, inclusive education, and technology integration. In the latter part of the 20 th century, technology was incorporated into education, starting with audiovisual aids and computer-based learning through to distance learning, online learning platforms, virtual classrooms, and collaborative tools, transforming education into a more flexible and accessible experience (Chiu et al., 2023; Ghahari & Nejadgholamali, 2019; Ng et al., 2023). Having emerged in the 2000s, personalized learning platforms and massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered free or low-cost online courses to a global audience and catered to individual student needs and learning styles. Finally and most recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has provided personalized recommendations, automated grading, and data-driven insights to optimize learning through such tools as Jasper, Sudowrite, Quillbot, and ChatGPT (Bates et al., 2020; Rahiman & Kodikal, 2024; Rospigliosi, 2023). The present handbook is a must-read for any aspiring teacher and researcher, providing a clear and concise guide on how to use ChatGPT in classrooms. It introduces ChatGPT as a cutting-edge tool that can revolutionize teaching and learning and spotlight the process rather than only the product. ChatGPT was created and offered by OpenAI as a pre-trained language model in 2022 and is an extension to a line of writing tools that build on Grammarly, the Hemingway app, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc. It is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model and is trained on a large dataset of conversational text. It is already reforming businesses and industries like higher education, similar to the printing press and the internet. At its core, ChatGPT uses AI to compose responses to queries spanning numerous topics. It can help educators optimize their classroom practices, particularly assignments, and evaluation, throughout the course rather than only addressing educational outcomes. Naturally, in education, the camps are divided between those opposing the use of ChatGPT as a result of concerns about academic integrity and potential cheating and those who believe it can be a valuable supplement to traditional instruction for supporting instructors and students. As an instructional technologist, Skrabut takes the latter stance and recognizes the potential benefits of ChatGPT in enhancing the learning experience. He maintains that ChatGPT for education is similar to calculators in math, which can be fine-tuned for a variety of natural language processing tasks such as language translation, question answering, and test construction.  "80 Ways to Use Chat GPT in the Classroom" offers a number of examples of using ChatGPT to enhance the classroom experience in teaching and learning. However, students need to be trained in information literacy, which is critical for developing critical thinking and lifelong learning skills. Simply rehearsing information from ChatGPT without verification does not contribute to meaningful conversation. Right at the beginning, the author provides the basic instructions to work with ChatGPT and then outlines a set of keys to using it more effectively. Surprisingly enough, the reader will find these instructions and hints highly comprehensive and informative. The keys to obtaining successful responses include (a) Be as specific as possible when making a request; (b) Use an iterative approach (asking the same question in different general or specific ways); (c) Ask ChatGPT to improve its responses to meet your expectations; (d) Assign ChatGPT a role/act to serve (e.g., act as Linux, interviewer, plagiarism checker); (e) Always validate its responses by applying critical thinking skills. Most favorably, the author has supplied multiple examples for each task that ChatGPT can do. Each example has two parts, including the prompt to provide to ChatGPT (bold-typed) and the response from ChatGPT (italicized). According to the author,  if ChatGPT is used appropriately and strategically, the possibilities are extremely helpful and time-saving. Chapter 2 indicates how ChatGPT can assist in the course preparation procedure, starting with the course description to developing classroom activities. In the first step, the user may ask ChatGPT to describe a course by clearly introducing what it is about. Next, ChatGPT can help in creating actual goals and objectives for the course. Here, the author suggests that users guide ChatGPT to create valuable results by citing Bloom's Taxonomy, for instance, in their prompts. An example of a good prompt suggested by the author follows: "Write learning objectives for a sports management course at the remembering level of Bloom's Taxonomy using verbs like Cite, Define, Describe, Draw, Enumerate, Identify, Index, Indicate, Label, List, Match, Meet, Name, Outline, Point, Quote, Read, Recall, Recite, Recognize, Record, Repeat, Reproduce, Review, Select, State, Study, Tabulate, Trace, Write" (p. 21). ChatGPT can also assist teaching practitioners in crafting lesson plans, classroom activities, warm-up questions and activities (i.e., icebreakers), community-building activities (e.g., teamwork and class discussions), lecture notes and outlines, and assignment prompts. What is highly important in persuading ChatGPT to prepare these tasks is to give it as specific prompts as the user can. Chapter 3 concerns using ChatGPT as a teacher assistant in personalizing instruction (i.e., personalized education). Some of its contributions include: (a) grading written assignments and essays (given either generic or specific guidelines), (b) facilitating reading comprehension by generating text summaries, (c) creating fill-in-the-blanks stories (i.e., Madlibs) usually in enjoyable and funny way, (d) crafting writing samples for any given prompt or topic, (e) creating personalized study plans attuned to each student's learning abilities, and (f) generating dummy data such as exemplars. What is highly important at this stage is to provide detailed and clear guidelines, precisely indicating the length, word size, and scope, before ChatGPT gets started. Here are some effective prompts as models: Generate questions about with corresponding answers at a college level; Provide ten creative writing prompts for an essay writing class at the high school level; What are some interesting or novel ways to begin a math class with children; What are some icebreaker activities one could use for a college-level course. In Chapter 4, ChatGPT is introduced as an effective tool for assessment by quickly and easily creating a variety of test tasks and questions. Among the ways in which it can serve as an assessment aid are creating assessment rubrics for subjective tasks and designing test items of a variety of formats, including multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, dichotomous or true-false, matching, and ordering forms. After deciding on and determining the target article or text as a prompt, one may ask ChatGPT in the following exemplary way: "Create one (or more) fill-in-the-blank exercise on " (p. 65). Chapters 5 and 6 illustrate how ChatGPT can assist teachers and students in developing study aids and classroom activities. Using ChatGPT in building study aids such as summaries, notes, outlines, flashcards, and vocabulary lists can make learning procedures more convenient, enjoyable, and effective. Teachers may ask ChatGPT to generate example sentences using a certain word, write a list of words and definitions for an article, and create a list of flashcards for the given words. ChatGPT can also aid in checking the authenticity of students' essays and in generating arguments and counterarguments on a given topic for classroom debates. The last two agendas, for instance, can be accomplished by giving the following prompts, respectively: "Did AI write this essay? " and "Debate me on the use of AI in higher education. I believe it should be used. You are to take the opposing side" (p. 77). Even more interestingly, ChatGPT can be assumed as a classroom member interacting with teachers and/or students. After raising a question or topic in the class, the teacher can ask the students to predict ChatGPT's responses and then compare the students' responses to those of ChatGPT. Given enough rubrics and guidelines, the students can also be invited to grade ChatGPT's responses and essays and realize the strengths and weaknesses of AI by themselves. Taking the students' side, Chapter 7 indicates how students can improve their writing and communicative skills by using ChatGPT as a digital tutor and partner. ChatGPT can help students in crafting essays, paper summaries, research papers, lectures, and presentations by improving both form (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, coherence) and content (e.g., themes, main ideas, ordering, and organization). In addition, it can provide feedback on their writing assignments before submission and help them revise their drafts after getting reviewed. ChatGPT can also serve as an assistant translator and conversation partner, thereby contributing to the student's language skills development. It is also a digital tutor, being accessible anytime not only to reply to the students' questions but also to personalize learning materials by adjusting the responses to their needs, age, and level of ability. For this purpose, the user may only need to guide ChatGPT in the following exemplary way: "Answer this question or explain this topic to a 15-year-old or beginning student". Further, ChatGPT can serve as an exceptional research assistant by helping students discover trending research topics, formulate research questions, develop annotated bibliographies, paraphrase and summarize content, find credible sources, and draft and edit sections of a document. Chapter 8 showcases how ChatGPT can be used in computer programming and application development. Given a specific and accurate script, ChatGPT can quickly and easily write codes, explain what a certain code does, troubleshoot the codes, clean up unnecessary codes, write scripts for Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Linux products, and enhance programs like spreadsheets or word-processing. Chapter 9 extends to other applications of ChatGPT, such as developing blog posts, writing book reviews, drafting grant proposals, writing play/video scripts, and role-playing scenarios. It also effectively assists in drafting email messages, letters of recommendation, job interview questions, press releases for projects, and award packages suitable for nominees and accomplishments. It can be further used for converting references to different formatting styles (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago), converting grammatical structures (e.g., number, gender, tenses), analyzing data sets, and summarizing large amounts of content before a meeting or classroom session. Chapter 10 illustrates how practitioners can suppress their inhibition and/or fear of using AI as an education and assessment tool. It offers fundamental guidelines and strategies that help teachers and students find ChatGPT an asset rather than a threat. There are times when AI is appropriate and others when it is not. Teachers may ask the students to detect its flaws and limitations; they should be explicit on what is allowed and what is not. For example, if they are not allowing tools like ChatGPT, explain why it is essential to refrain from using it and the educational benefit of the assignment. ChatGPT would not have access to proprietary academic databases. Additionally, it does not have access to current events. Another point to consider is that "ChatGPT is a textual interface. It cannot see images or hear audio files. The more friction you introduce into the assignment, the less appealing it will be to use AI" (p. 159). Although organizations and instructors can enhance their productivity and save time through ChatGPT, there is a caveat regarding the accuracy of the information it offers, requiring the users to check the information from multiple other sources. Skrabut explains his point very clearly by stating that AI will inevitably impact teaching and learning, just as previous technologies have, but educators are required to prepare students for this future. While ChatGPT is an intriguing emerging technology, it is not yet a perfect tool and it is essential to weigh the potential drawbacks. While the book provides comprehensive instructions with practical examples, it lacks depth in addressing ethical concerns and academic integrity. For instance, it does not sufficiently explore ChatGPT's potential drawbacks, such as the risk of over-reliance on AI tools or diminishing critical thinking skills among students. Furthermore, the discussion on academic integrity could benefit from providing instructors with a list of hands-on techniques on how to minimize the possibilities of AI-assisted cheating. Although the book is highly practical and advisable, these limitations may explain the need for further research and instructional guidance on how to mitigate the potential threats associated with ChatGPT use in educational milieus. 

Although dyadic collaborations (DC) are sensitive to individual differences, the role of levels of equality (LoE) and gender disparity as potential mediators are largely unexplored. To address the research gap, this case study investigated whether symmetrical (equal and gender-matched) and asymmetrical (unequal and gender-mixed) peer interactions differ in terms of efficacy for morpho-syntactic development and learners’ retrospective reflections. Forty-three young learners were randomly assigned into symmetrical (equal) and asymmetrical (unequal) pairs and into dyads of various gender dispersal (matched and mixed). The learners’ behaviors and perceptions during and following the paired tasks were recorded via observation, field notes, focused-group discussion, and member-checking meetings. The results of the Mann-Whitney U-test and Friedman Test were as follows: DC was more effective than non-collaborative learning for both short-term and long-term structure and vocabulary learning. It was helpful for expert-expert and gender-matched dyads in both domains alike and for experts and novices in unequal pairs in the structure area only. It was ineffective, however, for novice-novice and cross-gender dyads. Among the recurrent themes in observation and interviews were overall preference to pair up with female partners, consensus on the advantage of DC for grammar judgment (structure) over fill-in-the-blank (vocabulary) tasks, the realization of DC as effective for promoting rapport and responsibility, experts’ willingness to pair with novices or work alone, novices’ tendency to work with experts, and role of personality traits as a substantial mediator. Based on the findings, several implications for research and practice are offered.

Despite the increasing popularity of error treatment as a research subject, the effect of age as a potential learner-internal factor affecting choice of feedback is largely undertreated. Characterized by being at early stages of self-empowerment, young language learners are considerably vulnerable and in need of particular language input to meet their age-appropriate psychological demands. This study is one of the early attempts to detect the appropriate corrective feedback for children’s linguistic (grammar uptake) and personality (willingness to communicate) development. Thirty-seven young language learners ( mean age = 10.32) at two pre-intermediate classes in a non-profit language institute took part in this study. Following intact group design, they were divided into two groups of recasts and explicit feedback. Whereas in the recast group, all or part of an erroneous utterance was reformulated by teacher, correct forms were directly and explicitly provided in the explicit group in the course of a semester ( 19 sessions ´ 50 min=950 mins). A structured willingness to communicate (WTC) scale and two parallel grammaticality judgment tests were administered at pre- and post-intervention conditions; this stage was accompanied by the teacher’s formative observations using an unstructured WTC checklist and a tally chart worksheet. The results of the quantitative phase revealed higher grammar uptake for the recast group. Besides, students in the implicit group showed more WTC in both quantitative and qualitative investigations. These findings indicate that for young learners the use of a less direct way might be more effective in both raising their unconscious L2 knowledge and willingness to participate in classroom activities.

Underlying the recently developed notions of applied ELT and life syllabus is the idea that language classes should give precedence to learners’ life qualities, for instance emotional intelligence (EI), over and above their language skills. By so doing, ELT is ascribed an autonomous status and ELT classes can lavish their full potentials to the learners. With that in mind, this study aimed to design and validate a scale for appraising the current English language learning textbooks with respect to EI competencies. Having used several psychological models of EI, the authors developed a 44-item scale. The scale was then disseminated to in-service EFL teachers at non-profit language institutes in Iran. Rasch rating scale model was utilized to substantiate the construct validity of the scale. Three items, two representing impulse control and one pertaining to adaptability, misfitted the model, requiring to be pruned. The results also showed that the 6-point Likert scale functioned effectively. The scale is therefore a unidimensional and valid instrument with considerable implications for language teachers, syllabus designers, and materials developers.