Organizational and pedagogical conditions for teaching students foreign language written interaction based on practice with chatbots

Importance. Every day, thousands of people use chatbots for educational purposes: someone uses them to search for necessary information, someone uses them to do homework and prepare for lessons, but most simply use them to communicate, including in a foreign language. Paying attention to the didactic properties of chatbots and their methodological functions, it is not surprising that they are so rapidly integrated into language education, bringing many advantages. However, the issues of ensuring the quality of feedback from chatbots, information security and prevention of AI plagiarism, which students can use in the future, still remain controversial. Despite the fact that in modern scientific and methodological literature there is a body of work devoted to the integration of artificial intelligence technologies in foreign language teaching, in which the authors mainly considered the use of chatbots and neural networks for the development of students’ writing skills, no special conditions were noted that determine the minimum significant requirements for the beginning of the educational process which affect the effectiveness of training. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to identify the organizational and pedagogical conditions for teaching students foreign language written interaction based on practice with chatbots.
Materials and Methods. To identify the organizational and pedagogical conditions for teaching students foreign language written interaction based on practice with chatbots, the following groups of research methods are used: a) theoretical methods are used to familiarize and analyze scientific and methodological literature on the organization of foreign language teaching based on AI technologies in order to study the accumulated experience; b) empirical methods are used to conduct a survey of students and identify their general awareness of AI technologies and their didactic potential, observe the interaction of students with chatbots, and describe the results of the study. Definition of Concepts. The key concepts are “chatbot” and “language model”. To reveal the essence of chatbots in teaching a foreign language, their didactic properties and methodological functions are analyzed, and an up-to-date classification is presented.
Results and Discussion. The organizational and pedagogical conditions for teaching students foreign language written interaction based on practice with chatbots have been revealed: a) the level of foreign language communicative competence development of students by the beginning of training should be at least average (B1-B2) according to the Pan-European scale of foreign language proficiency CEFR; b) the presence of students and the teacher of industrial engineering skills for effective interaction with chatbots; c) conducting instruction with students on compliance with information security when interacting with chatbots; d) compliance with the rules of author ethics and prevention of plagiarism generated by chatbots; e) motivating students to use chatbots for educational purposes; f) developing a step-by-step learning algorithm and step-by-step following this algorithm.
Conclusion. The identification of organizational and pedagogical conditions for teaching students foreign language written interaction based on practice with chatbots allows us to identify pain points at the initial stage of training and prevent the development of negative scenarios when using AI technologies. Compliance with the identified organizational and pedagogical conditions makes it possible to achieve increased efficiency in the development of students’ foreign language writing skills. The obtained research results can be used to design methodological systems for teaching a foreign language using chatbots and other AI technologies.