Note: paid subscribers can see some of the AI prompts used to create the exercises below and easily download the complete lessons and all the materials at the end of the post.
The exercises I have created this week have got me thinking about ZSL. ZSL is an advanced artificial intelligence concept. In ZSL, a machine can recognize and classify items it has never been explicitly trained on. It can deal with unfamiliar or unknown situations. It uses knowledge from seen classes and additional auxiliary information – perhaps the information it has received from my past interactions with GPT4 - to predict unseen classes. It’s a little bit similar to human intuition which also draws upon a person's accumulated experiences, knowledge, and imagination to arrive at a conclusion or decision, even if the specific situation is new. The implication for ESL teaching is that from a vague idea you can easily and endlessly create exercises that are original, unique and extremely specialized. I have tried to give an example below.
I had a VERY VAGUE idea. I wanted to do something about numbers and statistics. I gave this vague prompt to GPT4:
“Create a list of 20 daily conversations when people use numbers.”
Usually, when I create a prompt, I have to create a kind of formula listing a whole set of requirements.
But this time, I got an amazing response. Before I go on, I should add a caveat here that I’m no expert in AI and I have to acknowledge that the quality of outputs from prompts can vary wildly. Nonetheless, in this case, the way GPT-4 extrapolated from a simple prompt seems to mirror the principles of ZSL, identifying and creating content it hasn’t been explicitly told to produce. It instantly provided a perfect set of distinct everyday contexts where numbers are used. It labeled the contexts. It labeled the speakers. The conversations are nice and short and focused on numbers. I didn’t specify any of this. The output is perfectly formatted for ESL teaching. So it’s exactly what I wanted, but way ahead of where my thinking was at. It provided me with an outline, a script with detailed content that enabled me to create a variety of exercises (see below). Really cool!
And it did even better when I asked it to do the same for business conversations (once you find a prompt that really works…it’s kind of a gold mine….you can transfer it or scale it out to any number of topics). The amount of detail and variety is amazing.
So, this is the cool part: we’re entering a world where AI tools do the heavy lifting and teachers get to have more fun in the classroom. This whole Zero Shot Learning (ZSL) thing is like having a super-smart alter-ego who takes your simple ideas and turns them into gold for your lessons. Think of ZSL as that friend who always "gets" what you're trying to say, even when you're not too clear yourself. For ESL teachers, this means more time creating interesting and focused content and less time-wasting. In the future, teaching won’t be about textbooks; it'll be about using online tools to make every class feel fresh and exciting.
The PDF, audio, and video exercises created from the above prompts are below:
1 Numbers and statistics for work
This is a listening/speaking lesson to help students understand numbers and statistics in a variety of business contexts.
2 Numbers for everyday situations
This is the same format as above but for general English. I haven’t made the video yet but it’s coming.
3 Conversational practice exercises for numbers
Below are some conversational practice exercises that could be used for one-on-one teaching or for pair work in classes.