For foreign language majors, artificial intelligence has indeed been widely used. For example, if low-grade students wanted to understand the meaning of a word in their early learning stages, they could only look it up in a dictionary. Now, with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools, you can quickly understand the meaning of the corresponding word. When senior students write papers, the assistive role of artificial intelligence is more obvious and common.
However, the impact of current artificial intelligence on foreign language subjects and foreign language teaching is limited, and will not have a fundamental impact on subjects such as literature and linguistics. Its power is reflected in the ability to infer based on existing knowledge, rather than the ability to create knowledge. If the entire paper is generated by artificial intelligence, not only the language, but even the opinions are provided by the machine, teachers can tell it at a glance.
Although students will use artificial intelligence tools to assist learning to a greater or lesser extent, the extent and ability of their use of the tools are uneven. I believe that proper use of artificial intelligence tools requires independent thinking. If there is a need to improve expression during the writing stage, modifications can be made with the help of a machine.
Therefore, in teaching practice, I am not opposed to students using artificial intelligence to assist learning. During the Industrial Revolution, machines improved the production efficiency of the textile industry. Can you ban their use? In fact, in the past, when there was no artificial intelligence, if there was a need for submission and publication of a foreign paper, some authors would also look for professional organizations to polish and revise it. Nowadays, machines are as capable as humans in this regard, saving a lot of time, energy and economic costs.
However, this does not mean that machines can replace human thinking, nor does it change the instrumental nature of machines. In traditional teaching situations, whether it is a dialogue between teachers and students or a dialogue between students, they are just conversations between people. Artificial intelligence has opened up a new dialogue mode-human-machine dialogue. This is a quality that students should master, and it is also an irreplaceable ability for human beings as tool users in the era of artificial intelligence.
During class, I will spend a small portion of my time instructing students on how to use artificial intelligence to revise articles. For example, by comparing different large language models, we can help students find the one that suits them. I will also take the initiative to share some prompts (prompt words) so that students can compare the differences before and after modification. If they have any questions about the modification results of the machine, they can come and ask me. In this way, students revise their papers more efficiently and accurately.
Of course, I will require students to provide both the first draft and the artificial intelligence-modified version to understand what their original level is like and how much artificial intelligence is used, so as to ensure the autonomy of paper writing.
When learning spoken dialogue, artificial intelligence can not only transcribe speech into text, but also help students quickly identify their own questions. In class, I will also use artificial intelligence to quickly display different expressions of the same topic together, and compare and evaluate them. In the past, if teachers wanted to implement this kind of comparative teaching, they could only write sentence by sentence on the blackboard or type it into PPT, which made it difficult to transform, organize and display students' oral expressions in real time.
From a scientific research perspective, in the past when we conducted linguistic research, the relevant variables in the corpus could only be achieved through manual annotation. An ideal paper requires at least two to three thousand pieces of corpus to support it. Manual annotation is very cumbersome and errors are inevitable. Nowadays, as long as appropriate instructions are given, the machine can quickly label the regular variables in the corpus. Many studies have shown that the consistency with manual labeling is high, and the efficiency of scientific research has been greatly improved.
Artificial intelligence is a subject synthesis - it has no sense of subject separation. High-level use of artificial intelligence tools can greatly reduce the difficulty of engaging in interdisciplinary research. For example, whether it is in the field of humanities and social sciences research or the field of natural science research, computer statistical models are often used. Without artificial intelligence, researchers must master programming skills. Now, as long as the artificial intelligence is given detailed enough prompts and has an effective dialogue with the machine, it can help researchers generate code.
Looking at the broader field of foreign language applications, artificial intelligence has indeed had a certain impact on the translation industry. Even so, translation has not been completely replaced. Translation through artificial intelligence still requires manual control in the end. This kind of check is not only a check on language expression, but also an ethical check to ensure that the translated content conforms to social ethics and mainstream values.
Artificial intelligence will not replace our majors, but will only affect the proportion of different modules in professional learning. In a traditional teaching situation, you might have to learn everything, but now you have to learn it in a focused way. This means that artificial intelligence not only improves learning efficiency, but also promotes a dynamic balance between different teaching modules.
I think what students lack is not intellectual teaching, but methodological teaching. In the past, colleges and universities may only introduce more methodological teaching at the master's level. However, now with the popularization of artificial intelligence tools, it is necessary to advance the teaching of methodology to the undergraduate level - allowing students to master methods and understand what aspects of artificial intelligence are Intelligence can be replaced, but which aspects cannot be replaced. You must learn it intensively, and adjust the direction of your own learning on this basis.