AI-responsive writing assignments transition from homework essays to writing by hand in the classroom.
The 2022–2023 Bacca Fellowship Program has given the three of us space to plan, collaborate, stumble, and forge ahead, in community with peers as we worked to phase in new writing assignments to our Spanish teaching. In lieu of composing essays on the computer, students in elementary and intermediate level Spanish classes now write by hand in class every other week, without access to any outside resources, for an average of fifteen minutes (depending on the level) in response to carefully designed prompts. These quick handwritten artifacts allow the instructor to rapidly "take the temperature" of the class by assessing students' production and to make adjustments to class planning, either by reviewing or adding further practice with certain vocabulary or language structures. In-class writing prompts allow us to answer the question, “what are our students really learning and what can they do with the language at this point in time?” Though our colleagues in the Spanish Language Program have been supportive of this transition, many of us still mourn the death of the college essay.
Background
Our interest in the relationship between second-language writing and its interface with technology goes back to the introduction of early search engines such as Google Search in 1998, followed by spellcheck and the launching of websites such as Wikipedia in the mid-aughts. Another key moment was 2011, when we noticed that students were relying on Google Translate —or more recently, DeepL—to compose their Spanish language essays. Google-translated texts have been the subject of late-night sketches and academic hallway chatter among faculty, accompanied by bemused observations that go something like, “students think they’re fooling me by turning in these Google-translated papers, but I know better! I’m on to them!”
We adapted a popular editorial cartoon by Graeme MacKay (mackaycartoons.net, used with permission) to illustrate the challenges facing foreign language (FL) writing, with a nod to machine translation (MT) and debates faculty used to have on the deleterious effects of spell check. “The third wave.” Twitter May 24, 2020. twitter.com/mackaycartoons/status/1264535174680903680
This chattering has been replaced by an acknowledgment that Google Translate and other programs now produce texts that are indistinguishable from human-crafted writing. Or, if turning in a perfectly crafted text is not the goal, ChatGPT 4.0 will create a grammatically-incorrect text in response to a prompt such as, “Write a text in Spanish about ingredients typically included in a pizza with a few grammatical and vocabulary errors.” In the face of these bewildering technological changes, the Spanish Language Program has spent several semesters piloting writing assignments that could be considered AI-irrelevant; that is, we have transitioned from formal essays written outside of class to handwritten tasks that take place inside the classroom.
Pilot Project & Reaching Out
Building on our ongoing research as part of the Bacca Fellows’ community, along with small projects conducted in the classroom, in the fall semester of 2022 we designed a pilot project in which we had first-, second-, and third-semester students write by hand during class time without access to resources. At the end of the semester, we surveyed those students to gauge their reception of the change and found that 91% (191 students out of 209) responded “strongly agree” or "somewhat agree” with the statement, “In-class writing is a good use of class time.” Here are four survey responses from our students:
“I enjoy the writing because I feel more confident. Writing is where I can best express myself in Spanish because I have time to think, so I can try to use all of the new forms and vocabulary.”
“I really enjoy being forced to write without a computer; it tells me what I can do off the top of my head and improves my Spanish more than writing with a computer.”
“I like the method as it sort of serves as a weekly ‘spot check’ to show my Spanish is progressing.”
“This is the first time in a Spanish class that I’ve written regularly without a computer and I have seen the most growth overall. I also enjoy it much more than writing on a device.”
Upon concluding the pilot project in Fall 2022, we learned that there was less resistance on the part of the students than we had anticipated. We also thought there would be a lot of pushback from students about writing by hand rather than on a laptop, and that did not materialize either.
Another element of the pilot project involved interviewing Spanish-language faculty from ten universities. In these focus groups we learned that our peers at other institutions are grappling with the same questions and had already begun implementing short and more frequent in-class writing. We presented both the survey results and the information gathered from our faculty focus groups at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in November 2022. Eleven days after our ACTFL presentation, ChatGPT 3.5 was released, which made our conversations on computer-assisted writing all the more urgent.
Implementation
As we sought to make the transition from pilot project to whole-program implementation, the Bacca Fellowship Program, which encourages faculty to try something new, gave us the needed space to move from the pilot to the implementation phase, and to make meaning of the experience in fellowship.
Considering our conversations with colleagues and the generally positive student reception, beginning in January 2023, as mentioned above, we eliminated multi-version, outside-of-class essays in our elementary and intermediate courses. We replaced these with frequent in-class, handwritten assignments, ensuring that students were practicing writing without access to outside resources.
Now What?
Revamping the writing curriculum has come with many rewards and several challenges. One reward is the way this initiative has allowed us to emphasize that writing is a messy process rather than a polished product; we remind students that we are not expecting perfection, and that we are interested in their voice, not a computer-mediated one. On the challenging side, we had expected some resistance on the part of instructors regarding rigor, rubrics, and logistics. What we saw was some initial resistance to the implementation of this project, but over the course of the semester our conversations and working groups showed a growing acceptance that we were on the right path. We have identified certain aspects that need tweaking, such as the feedback rubric and the number of in-class writing assignments according to the level, but we plan to maintain the bulk of the project as is. We are at the very start of our understanding of how artificial intelligence will continue to transform and impact writing. Research and experimentation with new tools on the block such as ChatGPT 4.0 (as of May 2023) is our next step. As always, our research and our teaching will complement each other as we move forward.
Suggestions for Fellow Faculty
Give yourself permission to run one focused, intentional experiment in your course or courses each semester. Start a conversation with your peers at other institutions and with colleagues at your own institution. Enlist the help of your students and solicit their opinion about the changes you make. Remember what you want to happen in your class, and why you do what you do. You can go back and recover a “blast from the past,” like writing by hand without access to the internet, as long as you are not reproducing old ways just for nostalgia’s sake. Never forget that student learning is always the prime objective.
IMAGE CREDIT: The authors would like to thank editorial cartoonist Graeme MacKay, who graciously adapted his famous cartoon for this blog post. Computer-based writing tools used in the composition of this blog post were Google Docs and Grammarly. ChatGPT 4 helped us craft the title.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Lisa Merschel, Joan Munné, Melissa Simmermeyer
