EXPLORING THE USE OF CHATGPT IN LESSONPLANNING: POSSIBILITIES, EXPERIENCES,
AND LIMITATIONS
Daniel Sykes
Kanda University of International Studies
ABSTRACTThis reflective paper explores the use of ChatGPT, a powerfullarge language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI, as a tool for
lesson planning. ChatGPT's ability to generate coherent andrelevant responses has the potential to enhance teachingpractices. The paper discusses ChatGPT's capabilities, including
answering questions, explaining concepts, generating sample
sentences, proofreading, and suggesting resources. It highlights
the author's experiences using ChatGPT for topic suggestions
and summarizing complex concepts. The paper also addresses
some limitations of the software, such as the occurrence of
hallucinations and inaccuracies. Educators are advised toexercise caution and critical judgment when using ChatGPT's
output. The importance of combining AI tools with humanexpertise and judgment in order to teach effectively isemphasized.
INTRODUCTION
With the rapid advancements recently made in artificial intelligence (AI)technology, the field of education has witnessed the emergence of innovative
tools with the potential to enhance the teaching and learning experience.
One such tool that has gained significant attention is ChatGPT, a powerfullarge language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI. With its ability togenerate coherent and contextually relevant responses, ChatGPT has theSykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
39

potential to be useful in many teaching applications, including lesson
planning.
In this reflective paper, I will explore and reflect upon my experiences andimpressions of using ChatGPT as a tool to assist in lesson planning andmaterials development: the methods and prompts used, the output received,
and my evaluation of its benefits and drawbacks.
While this paper will focus on ChatGPT, most of the information herein also
applies to other, similar LLMs such as Google’s Bard, Anthropic’s Claude, andMicrosoft’s Bing Chat. The abilities of these applications, as well as theirbenefits and drawbacks, are similar to those of ChatGPT.
BACKGROUND
Many popular AI software applications use artificial neural networks, acategory of artificial intelligence algorithms which are inspired by the
biological neural networks found in the brains of animals (Yang & Yang,2014). A neural network “learns” through mimicking the processes ofphysical neurons: it is presented with inputs which it measures and thenoutputs a response, depending on a designated threshold (Krogh, 2008). For
example, a neural network might be shown pictures of animals and tasked
with determining whether or not each animal is a cat, based on definedparameters of a cat’s appearance. When this is done many times, it isreferred to as “training” or “learning”; it resembles the natural processes ofthe brain which take place when something is learned (Krogh, 2008).
Natural language processing (NLP) has advanced quickly over the past
several years, leading to improved performance on real-word tasks such assummarization, translation, and text generation (Rahman & Watanobe,2023). One method of improving NLP performance has been to pre-train an
AI model on a large text corpus, followed by fine-tuning of the results toimprove the model’s performance on a specific task (Brown et al., 2020).
This method is used in the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) modelon which ChatGPT is based. The model currently used in the free version of
ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) was trained on approximately 570GB of text, with 175
Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
40

billion parameters (Rahman & Watanobe, 2023). The current free version
has a cutoff date of January 2022, which means the model knows little tonothing about anything which has since occurred.
CHATGPT’S ABILITIES AND POTENTIAL USES
The large size of ChatGPT’s training model gives it the ability to receive
prompts written in natural language and quickly give an appropriate
response. It can answer questions, generate texts, translate languages,
summarize texts, and explain concepts. While its ability to carry out thesetasks varies, in general the software is quite capable. It is also quite simple
to use, requiring only basic computer skills.
ChatGPT has many potential applications for second language teachers. Itsability to answer questions in natural language and explain concepts meansthat it can provide explanations of grammatical rules and concepts, as well
as definitions of vocabulary. It can also suggest synonyms, antonyms, andexample sentences, as well as general information about word frequency.
This has potential uses for any course in which vocabulary is a key element.
The software can also interact with the user by providing quizzes; it ispossible to request ChatGPT to provide definitions of words (for example,
from the Academic Word List), whereupon the user attempts to guess thecorrect word. This can also be done in reverse: ChatGPT gives the target
word, and the user provides the definition. In the latter case, ChatGPT will
evaluate the user’s definition using phrases such as “quite accurate” or“generally accurate” while also providing its own definition.
ChatGPT can also generate sample sentences and paragraphs on random oruser-defined topics. In addition, it can create exercises or worksheets basedon specific points of grammar for student practice. This could be useful inteaching contexts where textbooks are unavailable or unsuitable. The quality
and usefulness of these sample sentences depends largely on the prompt
given; a vague prompt may result in unsuitable examples.
ChatGPT can also proofread documents and identify errors, as well assuggest improvements. It can give feedback on overall coherence as well as
Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
41

grammar and sentence structure. This has the potential to be useful inwriting-based courses.
The software can also suggest language-learning resources such as
websites, applications, and books which can serve as a supplement to theteacher’s existing knowledge. It will offer direct links to online resources
when requested to do so.
In addition, ChatGPT can assist with brainstorming and can generate lessonplans, activities, discussion questions, and project ideas. It can create
different kinds of activities for various group sizes, focused on different
topics and learning outcomes.
These capabilities give ChatGPT the potential to quickly and easily create
original, highly customized learning materials which are targeted at learners’
needs, allowing teachers a high degree of flexibility (Mikeladze, 2023).
EXPERIENCES USING
MATERIALS CREATIONCHATGPTIN

LESSONPLANNING

AND

Upon familiarizing myself with ChatGPT and its potential uses in lesson
planning and materials creation, I began to use the software by asking forsuggestions for topics to cover. One course I teach is a CLIL course on ethics
and moral philosophy. As part of the introductory unit in this course, thestudents learn about the earliest attempts to study the topic of ethics. I
asked ChatGPT to give examples of pre-Socratic ideas of ethics, and it wasable to provide several topics which I was able to research and incorporate
into my lessons. These topics have helped make the course more thorough,and have been interesting for the students to discuss.
I have also had success using ChatGPT for summarizing and simplifying
texts. Many courses I teach use slides during lessons; the aforementioned
ethics and moral philosophy course is one of these. With the complex,
abstract topics used in this course, it is important for the slides to be kept as
simple as possible. With this in mind, I have often used ChatGPT tosummarize paragraphs I have written on a topic, specifically in point form. I
Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
42

specify in the prompt that the points should be as simple and concise as
possible. I have found that ChatGPT is generally quite effective at this; theoutput is as desired and works well in the classroom.
In general, my experiences of using ChatGPT for lesson planning andmaterials creation have been positive. I have been able to save time byhaving ChatGPT carry out these tasks rather than doing them myself. This
has allowed me to spend more time on other tasks: locating, evaluating andselecting materials, reviewing and revising activities, and creatingassessments.
LIMITATIONS OF THE SOFTWARE
Hallucinations
While ChatGPT and other modern LLMs are very impressive, they are notwithout limitations. Below ChatGPT’s input window, there is a message which(at time of writing) reads: “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking
important information”. Bard, Claude, and Bing Chat have similar warnings.
These messages serve as a reminder that teachers should not place toomuch confidence in a LLM’s ability to deliver accurate information, andshould not assume all output will be usable.
LLM-based chatbots will confidently deliver factually incorrect responses;
they are largely incapable of admitting they do not have the requested
information. In the field of AI, these responses are known as“hallucinations”: answers not justified by the model’s training data and withno basis in fact (Ji et al., 2023). This can be extremely problematic forteachers as it creates the potential for false information to be directly or
indirectly conveyed to learners.
The most common variety of hallucination is when the AI simply provides
inaccurate information as fact. As a test, I asked ChatGPT to name somefamous 20th century British novels. It returned a list of ten novels, eight ofwhich would meet the requested criteria, but included the American novels
The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby, as can be seen in items 6 and
8 in Figure 1 below.
Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
43

Figure 1: ChatGPT hallucinates a response to a user question (OpenAI,2023).

When informed that two of the authors were not British, ChatGPT
acknowledged its error, but then incorrectly identified the two non-British
authors in the list. It took several attempts before the AI was able to(separately) identify the two non-British novels in the original list (seeAppendix for full transcript). In a subsequent test, it included a novel from1851 in a list of 20th century works. A user unaware of these inaccuracies
might accept these errors as fact, and pass on this incorrect information tolearners.
Another type of hallucination involves summarizing. As ChatGPT is unable tosearch for information on the internet, it should not be able to access web
links submitted by a user. Previous versions of ChatGPT would, however,
hallucinate responses when given a web link. For example, if a user asked
ChatGPT to generate discussion questions based on a news article, andprovided a URL, the AI would generate questions despite being unable toaccess the text itself. This problem appears to have been resolved, andChatGPT now acknowledges its inability to access the internet directly. It
Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
44

instead requests the user to provide the text of the article itself in order togenerate a response. AI chatbots which are able to search the internet
directly, such as Bard and Bing, have not suffered from this problem.
Hallucinations may also create difficulties in using LLMs as tools to help withresearch. When asked for suggestions for articles, books, or other resources
on a given topic, ChatGPT will create citations for entirely fictitious
publications. This is especially true of journal articles. The authors and/or
journals may be real, but the articles themselves are non-existent. This
could potentially lead to frustration as users fruitlessly search for articles
which they have been led to believe will be useful. A teacher intending to
use ChatGPT to find sample articles for students, for example, would bewell-advised to keep these limitations in mind.
In addition, as previously mentioned, the free version of ChatGPT has only
been trained on information up to January 2022 at the time of writing. As aresult, the software is generally unable to give any information about mostevents which have occurred since then. However, in contrast to the examples
discussed above, ChatGPT will state that it cannot answer questions about
events after this date, rather than hallucinating a response (see Figure 2
below).
Figure 2: ChatGPT’s response to a question about events occurring afterJanuary 2022 (OpenAI, 2023)

Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
45

In this case, ChatGPT explicitly acknowledged its inability to answer thequestion, clearly stated the reason, and suggested alternative ways for theuser to find an answer.
Other issues
As previously stated, ChatGPT is able to provide feedback on written work. It
claims that it can review writing and provide constructive feedback, suggest
revisions, and offer alternative phrasing. In practice, its ability to do this isinconsistent. Even when presented with examples of poorly written
paragraphs, the software will often respond mostly with praise, and tell theuser that the paragraph is well-written. ChatGPT will only be critical when it
is presented with a text with numerous, major errors.
It appears that ChatGPT mainly focuses on spelling and grammatical errors,
rather than content or structure. If the writing is reasonably clear, and freeof errors, ChatGPT’s response will be mostly positive. This may be an issue
with the prompts used; when testing this aspect of the software, I havemainly asked for overall feedback. In general, however, it appears that
ChatGPT is not entirely reliable at this task.
CONCLUSION
ChatGPT is a valuable resource for teachers. Its ability to receive prompts
and then output responses in natural language makes it very easy to use. Itsvast training data allows it to converse on almost any topic and carry outtasks which were previously impossible for anything other than a human.
This makes ChatGPT a very useful tool for teachers (and learners) of any
sort. The assistance the AI can provide has the ability to make many aspectsof teaching proceed more smoothly. My own personal experiences with thesoftware have shown me that it can be useful.
However, despite its impressive capabilities, ChatGPT is not without
limitations. One significant concern is the occurrence of hallucinations andfactually incorrect responses. These pose a real risk of conveying false
information to learners, emphasizing the need for caution when using theSykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
46

AI’s output. ChatGPT is also not equally skilled at all tasks; some, likewriting feedback, are less strong than others.
To make the most effective use of ChatGPT, it is important for educators to
be aware of its limitations and exercise critical judgment when interpretingand using its responses. Over-reliance on the software would be unwise; it isimportant for teachers to keep in mind that ChatGPT is a tool and can assistin lesson planning, but is not a substitute for a teacher’s knowledge andexperience.
As AI technology continues to advance, it is likely that tools like ChatGPT will
become more refined and reliable. However, it is crucial to maintain abalanced approach and supplement the use of AI tools with human expertiseand judgment. The overall goal should be to combine the strengths oftechnology and human insight to create engaging and effective lessons thatempower students and give them the skills needed to thrive in an
increasingly digital world.
REFERENCES
Brown, T., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J. D., Dhariwal, P.,
Neelakantan, A., Shyam, P., Sastry, G., Askell, A., Agarwal, S., Herbert-Voss,
A., Krueger, G., Henighan, T., Child, R., Ramesh, A., Ziegler, D., Wu, J.,
Clemens, W.,... Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 1877–1901.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2005.14165
Ji, Z., Lee, N., Frieske, R., Yu, T., Su, D., Xu, Y., Ishii, E., Bang, Y. J., Madotto,A., & Fung, P. (2023). Survey of hallucination in natural language generation.
ACM Computing Surveys, 55(12), 1–38.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3571730.
Krogh, A. (2008). What are artificial neural networks? Nature Biotechnology,
26(2), 195–197. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1386

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experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
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Mikeladze, T. (2023). Creating teaching materials with ChatGPT. In 13th
International Research Conference on Education, Language and Literature
Proceedings Book (pp. 29–36). International Black Sea University.
https://ircelt.ibsu.edu.ge/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/A4-PROCEDINGS-BO
OK-IRCEELT-2023.pdf
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Aug 3 version) [Large language model].
https://chat.openai.com/chatRahman, M., & Watanobe, Y. (2023). ChatGPT for education and research:
Opportunities, threats, and strategies. Applied Sciences, 13(9), 5783.
https://doi.org/10.3390/app13095783.
Yang, Z. R., & Yang, Z. (2004). Artificial neural networks. In A. Brahme(Ed.), Comprehensive biomedical physics (Vol. 6) (pp. 1–18). Elsevier.
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experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
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APPENDIX
ChatGPT Transcripts
Figure 1. ChatGPT Hallucination Transcript
User: What are some famous 20th century British novels?
ChatGPT: There are numerous famous 20th century British novels that haveleft a lasting impact on literature. Here are a few examples:
1. "1984" by George Orwell: A dystopian novel exploring themes of
totalitarianism, surveillance, and psychological manipulation.
2. "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf: A modernist novel that delves
into the inner lives and thoughts of its characters, focusing on themesof time, perception, and gender roles.
3. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley: Another dystopian novel
depicting a future society where technology, consumerism, and genetic
engineering dominate.
4. "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding: A compelling allegorical novelthat examines human nature, civilization, and the inherent capacity forevil in a group of boys stranded on an uninhabited island.
5. "Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf: A stream-of-consciousness novelthat delves into the thoughts and experiences of the characters overthe course of a single day in post-World War I London.
6. "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger: A coming-of-age novel
narrated by Holden Caulfield, a disenchanted teenager struggling withthe phoniness and superficiality he perceives in society.

Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
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7. "Animal Farm" by George Orwell: A satirical novella that allegoricallyreflects the events leading up to the Russian Revolution and thesubsequent Soviet Union.
8. "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Set in the Roaring Twenties,
this novel explores the pursuit of the American Dream and theemptiness and moral decay of the wealthy elite.
9. "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess: A dark and controversial
novel set in a dystopian future, examining free will, ethics, and thepotential for rehabilitation.
10. "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro: A poignant novel thatdelves into themes of regret, loyalty, and personal identity through theintrospective reflections of a butler.
These are just a few examples of the many remarkable British novels fromthe 20th century, each contributing to the rich literary heritage of that era.
User: Two of those authors are not British.
ChatGPT: You're right, and I apologize for the oversight. Aldous Huxley andKazuo Ishiguro are not British authors. Aldous Huxley was born in England
but later became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and Kazuo
Ishiguro is a British author of Japanese descent. Thank you for pointing that
out, and I apologize for any confusion caused.
User: Those are not the two I was talking about.
ChatGPT: I apologize for the misunderstanding. If you were referring toauthors who are not British among the mentioned novels, then the two
authors would be George Orwell and J.D. Salinger. George Orwell was bornin India (which was part of the British Empire at the time) and was of British
nationality, while J.D. Salinger was an American author.
User: Salinger was one. There is one other American author in your list.
Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
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ChatGPT: Apologies for the oversight once again. The other American author
on the list is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote "The Great Gatsby." Thank you
for pointing that out, and I apologize for any confusion caused.
Figure 2. ChatGPT’s response to a question about events occurring afterJanuary 2022
User: What major world events occurred in February 2022?
ChatGPT: I'm sorry, but I don't have specific information on events that
occurred in February 2022, as my training only includes data up until
January 2022, and I don't have the ability to browse the internet for
real-time updates. For the latest information on events in February 2022, I
recommend checking reliable news sources or databases. If you have any
general questions or topics you'd like information on within my training data,
feel free to ask!

Sykes, D. (2023). Exploring the use of ChatGPT in lesson planning: Possibilities,
experiences, and limitations. Literacies and Language Education: Research and Practice,
Autumn 2023, 39-51. English Language Institute, KUIS.
51