YOKOHAMA — The effective use of artificial intelligence (AI) to practice pronunciation and composition has led to a significant improvement in the English skills of elementary school students in Yokohama City.
Seiko Gakuin, a private junior and senior high school in Yokohama, saw a large increase in the number of students who passed the entrance exam to the University of Tokyo this year. One of the reasons for this is the use of AI in classes. The reporter visited the school and asked how the students were studying, and was surprised to find that they were using more paper than expected.
Practice pronunciation multiple times with AI
In a class for first-year junior high school students, students were reading aloud English sentences displayed on the screen of an ICT (information and communication technology) device. The AI-based English pronunciation improvement app “ELSA” judged the students' pronunciation and marked their mistakes in red, while the teacher watched the students' mouth movements and gave them advice. The students had fun working on the exercise until they were able to pronounce the words correctly.
Shunsuke Takagi (42), an English teacher at Seiko Gakuin, said, “The students' reaction was fantastic. It didn't even look like they were studying.”
The school introduced ELSA in September 2022. Until then, students lined up in the hallway and read English sentences one by one to check their pronunciation. The average class size in Japan is about 40 students. It took 2-3 hours for everyone to finish the class, and each student could only receive advice once.
However, after introducing ELSA, the situation changed completely. Students can now practice pronunciation as many times as they like, and Takagi-sensei has more time to give individual advice to each student. “Because students can now practice independently, the efficiency has definitely improved,” says Takagi-sensei.
Strengthening your pronunciation will improve your listening skills
Takagi-san has an interesting background. He was not good at English in junior high school. He started to seriously study English after he became a university student. He started teaching English as a part-time instructor at a cram school, and relearned junior high school English. After graduating, he worked as an English teacher at private junior and senior high schools. At that time, he was a “classroom expert” who diligently researched what kind of lessons would help improve students' abilities.
However, one day, Mr. Takagi hit a wall and wondered, “I'm teaching so hard, but why are there students whose grades aren't improving?” He realized that it is the students themselves who learn, and he wondered, “What can I do to raise students who are good at learning?”
In 2019, she began studying educational evaluation at the University of Melbourne Graduate School in Australia. While studying abroad, she used ELSA to study English. She plans to use it again at Seiko Gakuin, where she will be working from 2022 after returning to Japan.
The advantage of ELSA is that it gives immediate feedback. When users read aloud, the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation is quantified as a percentage. Takagi says that it is difficult to hear sounds that you cannot pronounce yourself. By reading aloud while paying attention to pronunciation, listening skills can be improved.
Last year, the listening scores of the high school seniors he taught improved in mock exams. In the 2012 entrance exams for the University of Tokyo, 100 students from Seiko Gakuin passed. This is 22 more than last year. The University of Tokyo entrance exam places emphasis on listening, so the improvement in Takagi's students' English skills is probably not unrelated to the increase in the number of successful applicants.
Cultivate students who have the ability to learn independently
On the other hand, Takagi-san was surprised that ELSA was only used for 10 minutes out of the 50-minute lesson. “ELSA is not magic, so it can't do everything,” said Takagi-san.
In class, students first listen to English sentences and experience listening to only fragments of the content. Because not understanding the sound or meaning of words is an obstacle to listening, students repeatedly practice words and sentences on paper printouts and thoroughly input the information. Then, finally, they use ELSA.
Takagi's courses are designed to help students realize that, even after just one lesson, they have a much better understanding of English texts than they did at the beginning. “Using AI without any purpose won't work,” Takagi says. “If students have a clear purpose and experience effective learning methods in class, they will be able to replicate them at home.”
Takagi also uses the conversational AI chatbot “ChatGPT” for high school students. “It took me a long time to read my students' English compositions and decide if their expressions were okay. But what I really want to see is whether the logical development is appropriate,” says Takagi. So, before submitting their compositions, students use ChatGPT to revise them to some extent, and Takagi then corrects them.
For Takagi, AI is a partner that helps him achieve things that he had previously given up on because they were too much of a burden. “It's okay to fail. I want to raise students who can grow from their mistakes and learn on their own,” says Takagi.
Rather than AI taking our jobs, we realized we could use it to do the work we want to do.
(Original Japanese text: Mizuki Osawa, Digital News Group)
