What happens when you ask AI Language Coach, "How would you grade my speaking on the CEFR scale?"

Learner:

How would you grade my speaking on the CEFR scale?

The video is only 1 1/2 minutes long

Coach:

That's a very natural question to ask. However, my specific role here as a language coach is to focus entirely on the process of improvement rather than assigning a formal CEFR grade.

There are a couple of key reasons for this approach:

1. Text vs. Audio: I am working from a written transcript of your speech. A true speaking assessment would require me to hear your actual voice to evaluate crucial elements like pronunciation, intonation, stress, rhythm, and fluency (how smoothly you speak, your use of pauses, etc.). These are just as important as grammar and vocabulary.
2. Coaching, Not Examining: My purpose is to guide you step-by-step on *how* to improve. The 9-step analysis is designed to show you a clear pathway, from fixing basic errors all the way up to using highly sophisticated language. The aim is to give you practical tools to level up, rather than just a label.

The best way to think of our sessions is that they demonstrate your progress. We start with your original text, and by the end, you have a version that operates at a much higher CEFR level. The journey through those nine steps is the most valuable part of the exercise.

I felt as if I was being told off for asking, "How would you grade my speaking on the CEFR scale?" And as I gave the instructions myself to Google's AI Studio about how it should design the AI Language Coach, maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised. Line 3 was, "Decide CEFR level (+ for half bands) but don’t reveal it. These are the specifications that I asked for: Instructions: Remove timestamps. Decide CEFR level (+ for half bands) but don’t reveal it. After each step (1–9), wait for “next.” Write in continuous prose. Answer questions at the learner’s level. Steps: 1 Identify errors in bold and enclose in [brackets]. 2 Correct errors, showing corrections in bold next to (errors). 3 Write the corrected version without mistakes. 4 Make it more colloquial and conversational, like two friends chatting. Mark changes next to original phrasing. 5 Write the changed version in full. 6 Rewrite it half a CEFR level higher, keeping it colloquial. Use more advanced vocabulary and idioms. Mark changes. 7 Write the updated version in full. 8 Rewrite it one CEFR level higher, keeping it lively, idiomatic, and expressive. Mark changes. 9 Write the final version in full.

AI Language Coach - Feedback on a B1 student retelling a story about the Maxwell Wildlife Park

I've made another video about how the AI Language Coach, which is still changing almost every day, could have provided valuable feedback for a student who made a recording about the Maxwell Wildlife Park. Sadly, the feedback is 10 years too late for her, but I think she would have benefitted from it, or at least the first seven steps.

The video is 13 minutes long and shows many of the 9 steps the AI Language Coach was asked to go through.

Step 1 - identifying the errors (not shown)

Step 2 - correcting the errors

              It is often useful and necessary to ask, "Can you explain these errors?"

Step 3 - reading and listening the corrected transcript Read Aloud

Step 4 - ways to make the transcript more colloquial (not shown)

Step 5 - reading and listening to a more colloquial version Read Aloud

Step 6 - ways to make the transcript 1/2 a CEFR level higher (not shown)

Step 7 - reading and listening to a more sophisticated version

Step 8 - ways to make the transcript another CEFR level higher (not shown)

Step 9 - reading and listening to an even more sophisticated version 

            - Asking for help with vocabulary during any of the nine steps (overarching)

            - Interacting with the AI Language Coach (I particularly like ...)

At the end I emphasise that, "It is only fair to say that this video has been edited to remove long pauses before the Read Aloud begins"

From Word and a photo, to a Gemini Storybook, to PowerPoint and finally to an .mp4 video

When our granddaughter's 15th birthday was approaching my daughter asked me to look back at when I was 15 and find a photo and write about my life at that age. I found a photo of me with longish hair, as it was 1962/1963, and started writing about my life as a 15-year-old.

I then uploaded to Gemini what I had written and the photo and later a picture of the boater that we had to wear at Sevenoaks School and asked for a Storybook. I had to correct a couple of things as my name was never Julian and the boater wasn't pictured accurately.

I shared everything with my daugher, who shared it with our granddaugher.

A couple of weeks later I read again Joe Dale's suggestion about how you could download and edit a Gemini Storybook and decided that I wanted to try it for myself.

I'd read somewhere else that you could always print a Storybook and with the option to print to pdf, I chose that and got a pdf. The next step that Joe suggested was to go to PDFGear's Convert PDF to PowerPoint Online Free page and convert my file to a Powerpoint file. For some reason one of the pictures failed to convert, but as the .ppt file was editable I was able to 'snip' the missing photo from the Storybook and add it to the page where it should have been.

The next step was to edit the text to make it more suitable for a B1 learner of English, and here it helped that I have a subscription to Microsoft 365 Family, so I could ask M365 Copilot to make a new version of all the texts that would be suitable for a B1 student. I then copied and pasted each text into the editable text boxes on the right of each slide.

I asked Copilot if it could provide me with an audio file of the text read aloud by a male British voice, which Copilot said it coudn't do, but it suggested I record myself reading it. I decided to do this using PowerPoint and recorded myself reading each slide as it was displayed. At the end it offered me the option to Export the file as an .mp4 file, which I later uploaded to YouTube.

I was delighted to be able to try out Joe Dale's idea for myself and thought it offered a wonderful way to make compelling comprehensible input for learners of any language

You can use and adapt the Google AI Studio app called 'AI Language Coach' I am working on

I've just uploaded two more videos about the Google AI Studio app called 'AI Language Coach' that I am working on. The great thing is that you can play with it, make a copy of it and make any changes you like to your copy. Here are the two videos:

And here is the link to the latest version which saves the feedback to your local device:

https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1qF_GxF-3cZJ-TuZBDBd8SMKeR5Yb5-Wa 

If you would prefer it not to save feedback to the local device, you can try this version:

https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1zNZ7V5ocmpVAnBi7xE1GbvTaI519eICD 

I've just added another feature that makes it possible for users to ask about the meaning of a word, which was possible before but was lost with the change to a button to move to the next step

Google's AI studio - you can make a sharable app in five minutes

I adapted Darren Coxon’s similar app here which gave very detailed feedback

AI Language Coach

Practice your English conversation skills with an AI-powered language coach. Get real-time spoken responses, live transcriptions, and receive brief, constructive feedback on your performance.

Last week I used Google's AI studio to produce this app. It isn't perfect but it only took about 10 minutes. My first version allowed you to have a conversation with a chatbot and gave you feedback on your English. The second version also allowed you the option to upload an audio file and get brief feedback on the English. I asked it to add an option to ulpload an audio file and went away to make some toast and a cup of coffee and it was ready when I got back!

These were the instructions I gave it originally:

Here are two examples of feedback it provided:

I'll try and find time to improve the feedback one day, but AI Studio is full of suggestions for ways to improve the app:

 

My 9-step prompt with Copilot + an interesting surprise

 

Bargain Sweater – experimenting with Turboscribe and Copilot

After Matthew Wemyss said on a webinar I was watching entitled AI Literacy – What Is It, Really? that ChatGPT was the worst LLM for young students to be using unsupervised, I decided to see if my 9-step prompt would work just as well on Copilot as on ChatGPT.

I used my ‘Bargain Sweater’ example on my Android phone, on my iPad and on my computer. It was so interesting that I have already made two videos of how that worked out. The one on my Android phone is already on YouTube, the iPad one just needs editing and the one on my PC, I haven’t even made yet.

There is ONE HUGE difference between how my 9-step prompt works with ChatGPT and Copilot. With Copilot when you ask for the different versions to be read aloud, you never know what you’ll get! Admittedly, Copilot usually reads out the written version verbatim prefaced by notes like (With an animated and bubbly tone), but sometimes it produces a much more colloquial version of the same text and even, on one occasion it reenacted the dialogue between the two women. Sadly, students don’t see these alternative versions written down and if they want to listen to them again, they may well just get the verbatim text or another colloquial version or even a recreation of the two women speaking!

To give you a flavour of the spoken language that Copilot sometime produces, here are a few examples:

1.      if you don't mind me asking?

2.      Go on have a guess.

3.      they were just chatting away

4.      let me tell you the compliments were flying.

5.      absolutely adored it

6.      they got on to the topic of how much it cost

7.      … was like oh why don't you guess

8.      nifty little 25% discount

      Here's the 11-minute video I made by recording the screen on my Android phone and commenting on it:

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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and AI Warnings

I was reading an article about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on the BBC website Frankenstein: Why Mary Shelley's 200-year-old horror story is so misunderstood when I started to see a parallel between the fears in her time and in her novel about the dangers of science getting out of control and today's fears about the potential dangers of AI. 

So, obviously, I uploaded the article to NotebookLM and asked it to “trace the parallels between the dangers of Science depicted in *Frankenstein* and the fears associated with artificial intelligence (AI) today”. I then copied and pasted the reply as a source.

I then asked NotebookLM to make a video overview  based on this single source. As always, I was blown away by the resulting video.

The only creative part that was down to me was my seeing the parallels between the fears described in the article and the fears we read about every day and seeing that NotebookLM might produce something interesting, which it did!