Are Chat GPT and Google Translate better than glosses when learning L2/L3 words during writing? 28th April

Prof. Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic will be talking about the design and some results of our Polish-Swiss project on vocabulary learning. Join us in room 3.411 (Dobra 55) on Tuesday 28th April at 13.30. Online participation is also possible. For those wishing to join us online, please write to a.otwinowska(at)uw.edu.pl.

Although writing is an everyday experience for students, learning academic words through writing remains largely unexplored. When writing in a foreign language (L2/L3), students often use digital tools such as online dictionaries, translators (e.g., Google Translate), or LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT). Generally, digital tools can aid L2/L3 vocabulary learning, because they allow immediate access to information. However, their impact on word learning when writing is still under-researched . For instance, using ChatGPT or Google Translate may yield different levels of learner engagement with unknown L2/L3 words than dictionaries, leading to different learning gains. It is also unclear how individual learner differences (L2/L3 proficiency, multilingualism, cognitive abilities) affect word learning when interacting with digital tools.

To investigate this, we designed a pretest-posttest experiment spanning five weeks (sessions). We will discuss the design of Track 1 of our research. We will present the results from 134 learners of L2/L3 English: 77 bilingual Polish and 57 multilingual Swiss (L1-French or L1-German) participants. We will also touch upon the design of our on-going research in Track 2, which involves word learning from audio-visual material.