attention residue: how to use smartphones in the esl/esol/tefl classroom

There are different ways of using digital technology in a student-centred classroom - and, specifically, if we are to have students as directing their own learning, then we need to be thinking about how to use smartphones in the English language classroom.

As a recent blog says, on managing the use of smartphones in language classrooms:

From time to time, a story hits the headlines that schools in some country or other are to ban mobile phones (cellphones for our American friends) during the school day in an effort to reduce bullying and boost academic performance. This always triggers a re-examination of the issues involved, but, of course, language lessons operate usually under slightly different circumstances...

And that's the point: this technology should be seen differently when used in the language classroom, as it does offer tools rather than endless distraction - if used well of course [and the writer of the blog piece goes on to suggest how to do that...]

There are lots of blog pieces by teachers suggesting how to use mobile devices in their ESL work. The latest look comes from Dimitris Kouniakis and Constantina Constantopoulou, as reported byBecci Knowles, writing in the E L Gazetter. Here they look at Smartphones and focus in learning: Friend, foe, or false ally?

Welcome to the concept of attention residue, a key phenomenon that helps explain why focus has become such a fragile resource in today’s classrooms and study spaces...

If attention is fragile, the learning environments must actively protect it. One of the most effective, evidence-based strategies is surprisingly simple: Create physical distance between students and their smartphones during study or learning periods.

In today’s attention-fragmented learning landscape, focus has become a skill that needs safeguarding and coaching. Attention residue reminds us that distraction isn’t just about willpower. It’s essentially about how the brain works. Leroy’s findings make one thing clear; every interruption leaves a trace that weakens attention. For students who already struggle with concentration, executive function, and cognitive overload, smartphones are quietly but significantly undermining their learning. By encouraging intentional distance from devices during study, we help learners reclaim their attention, reduce mental clutter, and engage with content deeply. Managing the learning environment isn’t optional anymore; it’s a necessity. Having said that, meaningful support doesn’t begin with new strategies but with well-designed attentional space

Smartphones and focus in learning: Friend, foe, or false ally? - E L Gazette

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trurl's electronic bard vs chatgpt

BBC Radio 4 does a 'bedtime story' most evenings - and this week, it's been The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem - Trurl's Electronic Bard.

As the BBC blurb says: Stanislav Lem's comic parables The Cyberiad, first published in the 60s, anticipate nanotechnology, our ambivalent relationship with the internet and debates around AI and creativity.

Published 60 years ago, The Cyberiad is indeed very relevant to today's 'debates'...

Especially in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of commentary:

Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad: I started on the part of the work called “The First Sally (A) or Trurl’s Electronic Bard,” and it hit me! The Electronic Bard is basically Lem’s prediction, from 1965, of ChatGPT. The Twenty-Third Sally, or How ChatGPT, The Electronic Bard, Created a Cacophony of Digital Storytelling in a Literature Class

"Have it compose a poem--a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!" The Lippard Blog: Trurl's Electronic Bard vs. ChatGPT

The science-fiction writer didn’t live to see ChatGPT, but he foresaw so much of its promise and peril. Thinking About A.I. with Stanisław Lem | The New Yorker

Rather creepily, one of Google's AI things is named after the story - as discussed on this Google Group's pages: Trurl's electronic bard

And here's a service which calls itself a Google bard ai detector AI Detector – Trusted AI Checker for ChatGPT, GPT5 & Gemini | JustDone AI

And to finish this bit, here's the full story - in digital format of course: Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf

AI news: Artificial Intelligence absorbs of Shakespeare’s sonnets to create original poem | Science | News | Express.co.uk [from 2020]

Finally, though, today's news from the BBC shows that it's not just poetry that AI is producing but pop divas: Sienna Rose: AI suspicions surround mysterious singer - BBC News

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what is 'enshittification'?!

A recent piece in the New Yorker on The Age of Enshittification looked at an interesting word: “Enshittification” was named the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023 and by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary in 2024. The embrace of the term reflected a sense of collective frustration.

And a recent piece on this blog also looked at the term: 6-7 or parasocial or enshittification - what makes a good word of the year?: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Back to the very beginning and end of the New Yorker piece:

Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. “Enshittification,” coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time. Google Search had become enshittified, showing ads and product links instead of relevant website results. TikTok had become enshittified, artificially “heating” specific videos so that some would go viral, inspiring copycats and goosing engagement while frustrating creators whose output didn’t get the same treatment. Twitter would soon become royally enshittified in its reincarnation as X, losing its status as a global town square, as it tipped into Muskian extremism and rewarded grifters and meme accounts over legitimate news sources. Spotify, iPhones, Adobe software, e-mail inboxes—it was hard to think of a platform or device that wasn’t seeing a decay in user experience. Wasn’t technology supposed to endlessly improve in the long run? ...

The book stops short of fully extrapolating enshittification to national politics, but the term is certainly also relevant in that realm. If the playbook Doctorow describes involves promising benefits to people only to erratically renege on, and degrade, existing services, then Donald Trump is the enshittifier-in-chief. Under his second Administration, scientific research, diplomacy, corporate watchdogging, and social services have all gotten worse. The beneficiary, of course, is largely Trump himself. Perhaps the worst outcome of enshittification is that it drives us to expect things to be bad, and to assume that they will only get worse.

Which is where the piece by the inventor of the word comes in, in a piece which Cory Doctorow wrote for the Guardian this week: Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again - or: The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives:

We adopted laws – at the insistence of the US trade rep – that prohibit programmers from helping you alter the devices you own, in legal ways, if the manufacturer objects. This is one thing that leads to what I refer to as the enshittification of technology. There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.

With lots more here:

Enshittification - Wikipedia

'Enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything | FT [February 2024]

What Is Enshittification? Definition, Effects, Mental Health Risk [November 2025]

What Does 'Enshittification' Mean And When Does It Happen? | HuffPost UK Life [November 2025]

Finally, for a look at this from two years ago when the term first came out, see this piece: Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part two: how chatgpt is ruining the internet:

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how good is grokipedia?

HOW GOOD IS WIKIPEDIA?

This is from a blog post from two years ago: Jay Doubleyou: Search results for wikipedia

Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet | WIRED [2020]

“Wikipedia Is Good for You!?” by James Purdy | Thematic Reading Anthology

Opinion | Science shows Wikipedia is the best part of the Internet - The Washington Post [2016]

Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher | Economist

Is Wikipedia a good source? When to use the online encyclopedia – and when to avoid it [2023]

Is Wikipedia a good source? When to use the online encyclopedia – and when to avoid it

In some countries, students are told not to use it - but perhaps they need to learn how to use it instead:

Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it’s a trustworthy source [2021]

5 Reasons to Actually Encourage Middle and High School Students to Use Wikipedia | Edutopia [2021]

What about today?

As this entry on the website says at Wikipedia: Don't cite Wikipedia on Wikipedia - Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is not an acceptable source for citations elsewhere on Wikipedia. As a user-generated source, it can be edited by anyone at any time, and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or simply incorrect.

This piece from this year from the website The Online Reputation and Wikipedia Blog asks Is Wikipedia Reliable in 2025:

Wikipedia is a great starting point for online research. It has a very good reputation and consistently ranks at the top of Google search results and has information on almost every topic. But is Wikipedia a reliable source? The answer as to whether it is trustworthy is both yes and no.

Sometimes, Wikipedia can be an accurate source of information. It is updated regularly and contains a wealth of knowledge from various sources (these are two of the main reasons it ranks so high in search). Articles that have many editors who are clearly experts and that include solid citations and references are usually quite reliable. Articles with less oversight tend to be less reliable.

Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia. This means anyone can edit its pages, which leads to wild inconsistencies across its pages. With 45,175,790 registered Wikipedia users, there is always the potential for bias or inaccuracies.

Therefore, when reading information on Wikipedia, it’s important to take the time to verify the accuracy of the information by looking for other sources that corroborate the facts.

So, Wikipedia is a good starting-off point.

But what about its 'politics'?

It's a long-standing point as to what might be the Ideological bias on Wikipedia - Wikipedia

One of the founders says it is biased: Wikipedia co-founder says online encyclopedia has been completely corrupted by woke ideology | Daily Mail Online

The other says not: Wikipedia is not woke, insists founder Jimmy Wales

On the right they say: How Wikipedia became Wokepedia - spiked

And on the left they say: Wikipedia’s Deep Ties to Big Tech | Institute for New Economic Thinking

Here's an excellent piece from the Manhattan Institute which says it's OK but could do better with regard to any political bias: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?

And a piece from today's Le Monde very much looks at the current situation: Wikipedia, under fire from conservatives and shaken by AI:

Nearing its 25th anniversary, the online encyclopedia faces multiple challenges: accusations of 'woke' bias, threats to contributors, AI-generated content and declining readership. Despite these issues, Wikipedia remains resilient. But for how long?

Wikipedia is "controlled by far-left activists." "Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority." "I will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia." These are just a few of the increasingly virulent messages posted online by Elon Musk, the world's richest man.

On October 27, Musk took things a step further by launching his own encyclopedia, Grokipedia, which he claimed would represent "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." More than 885,000 articles, all generated by artificial intelligence (AI), make up what he called a site "10X better" than Wikipedia....

WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES - AND ARE THEY ANY GOOD?

There are indeed other places to go, as detailed in this blog piece from 2021: Jay Doubleyou: alternative wikipedias

Although the best are probably here: 5 Terrifying Bastardizations of the Wikipedia Model | Cracked.com

Now we have Grokipedia. which according to it:  

Grokipedia is an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge.

And according to Grokipedia - Wikipedia:

Grokipedia is an AI-generated online encyclopedia developed by xAI. The site was launched on October 27, 2025, as version 0.1. Entries in Grokipedia are created and edited by the Grok large language model (LLM). Many articles are derived from Wikipedia, with some copied nearly verbatim at launch.

A problem seems to be its sources.

The Guardian [liberal/left] has said: In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

“Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,” Richard Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. “AI just hoovers up everything.”

The problem, said David Larsson Heidenblad, the deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, was a clash of knowledge cultures.“We live in a moment where there is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight. The Silicon Valley mindset is very different from the traditional scholarly approach. Its knowledge culture is very iterative where making mistakes is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, the academic world is about building trust over time and scholarship over long periods during which the illusion that you know everything cracks. Those are real knowledge processes.”

Andrew Dudfield, the head of AI at Full Fact, a UK-based factchecking organisation, said: “We really have to consider whether an AI-generated encyclopedia – a facsimile of reality, run through a filter – is a better proposition than any of the previous things that we have. It doesn’t display the same transparency but it is asking for the same trust. It is not clear how far the human hand is involved, how far it is AI=generated and what content the AI was trained on. It is hard to place trust in something when you can’t see how those choices are made.”

The Financial Times says Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is a major own goal | Financial Times:

Musk, who has called Wikipedia, on which Grokipedia is modelled, “Wokepedia” and has described the site as “an extension of legacy media propaganda”, demonstrates a facile understanding of human knowledge. After all, even our best approximations of what is true are constantly shifting, as new facts and developments emerge, and as the values that shape our understanding change...

Go and have a poke around in it and you will see what I mean. You will find Tommy Robinson described as a “citizen journalist” in glowing terms in the very first sentence of his entry. You will see Elon Musk’s 20lb weight loss highlighted in his entry as if that were important information, and you will find out that can be attributed to intermittent fasting (rather than to Mounjaro). You will read Kremlin talking points in the first paragraph of the entry on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, like the idea that the former is “denazifying” the latter. You might also be somewhat mystified — given its purported role in propagating legacy media propaganda — to find that, often, “content is adapted from Wikipedia”.

Instead of setting up a serious challenger to Wikipedia, Musk has scored a major own goal. Grokipedia demonstrates that, while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth (even when a majority of them have “liberal” biases) and it shows that, in a world in which stores of trust are so depleted, in which it’s so hard to know what’s real and what is fake, a site like Wikipedia is more important than ever.

Even Grok, the xAI chatbot the new site is named after, told me that “while Grokipedia improves on specific Wikipedia flaws — like verbose, overly critical entries on conservative topics — its AI gatekeeping creates a centralised ‘Musk’s truth’ filter, lacking Wikipedia’s distributed checks”, and that “it trades one set of biases for another, often with less accountability.”

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how to write digital materials using ai for the english-language classroom

Twenty years ago, it was all about 'what are we going to do with the internet' as teachers?!

Using the internet 2 | TeachingEnglish | British Council

It then moved onto 'what are we going to do with digital'?

Teach with digital – using digital tools to improve writing - YouTube

And now it's all about 'what are we going to do with AI'?!

How to Create Quality English Materials for Teaching Online Using Generative AI

The latest E L Gazette looks at the issues:

Fabio Cerpelloni sits down with Billie Jago, a writer and teacher trainer specialising in digital learning materials and assessment resources.

From classroom to content: A teacher’s guide to materials writing - E L Gazette

And there are lots of materials online to help us create our own materials online:

AI in education: how to use AI tools in your classroom

An introduction to the use of generative AI tools in teaching | Centre for Teaching and Learning

5 AI Tools That Will Save You 10+ Hours a Week as a Teacher - YouTube

Using AI in Teaching - Tools for Course Creation - YouTube

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the addiction economy

Some questions about how we behave:

Should we ban smoking? And should we allow the use of opium for personal recreation?

Are we too trusting of the promises of technology? Are we aware of the creepy ways video games are trying to get us addicted?

Is diet or exercise better for us - and especially for children?

This is the 'addiction economy' - as featured in the New World/European:

Everyone is addicted to everything

Big tech is using the ‘nanny state’ arguments pioneered by the tobacco and alcohol industries to convince us that their freedom to sell equates to our freedom to choose. The opposite is true

Joe Woof - 8 October 2025

Where does your brain go when you see an obese person eating a pastry in public? Or a drunk friend making a fool of themselves and passing out, yet again, at a party? What about the smokers on their drips outside the hospital, still lighting up? Or the person who gambled away their savings, lost family, job, self-esteem, and yet carries on in the hope of winning it back? Or the depressed, anxious young person who spends hours on their phone looking at who knows what and doesn’t seem to see the connection?

Everyone is addicted to everything - The New World

…

Hilary Sutcliffe and Joe Woof are the co-leads of The Addiction Economy initiative.

This initiative is not about heroin addicts in doorways or ‘the war on drugs’.  It’s about how and why mainstream addictive products have been allowed to flourish for the benefit of companies at the expense of the rest of us. And how to stop them. The Addiction Economy describes those industries who knowingly and unashamedly erode our ability to control our usage of their products beyond the point at which it harms us.

Our White Paper exploring the 5 Drivers of the Addiction Economy draws cross-sectoral lessons and we explore how they play out in 9 industries: 4 physical - unhealthy and ultra-processed foods, cigarettes, alcohol and vapes and 5 digital, social media, gambling, pornography, computer games and chatbots .

We also explore how the widespread focus on the lack of will power of individuals derails policy action and hampers effective unaddiction strategies.

The Addiction Economy

It's very much about how children are targetted:

“Just Say No’ isn’t working. Do we need a new approach to teaching about addictive products in schools? YES! — The Addiction Economy

And others have been looking at this phenomenon too:

Addiction Economy | No Mercy / No Malice

The Economics of Addiction: Turning a Profit on One of America’s Greatest Problems – Michigan Journal of Economics

Here's a video to finish:

The Addiction Economy - YouTube

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embracing digital creativity in the esl/esol/tefl classroom

We can worry about replacing teachers with AI - or we can 'embrace' the technology:

How teachers say they're embracing AI in the classroom - ABC News

AI in the Adult Classroom: how to embrace personalised learning without losing control

The latest E L Gazette looks at how we might do this:

Firstly, then: What’s the real issue? AI or the task itself?:

In this exclusive interview, Fabio Cerpelloni sits down with Sophia Mavridi, a digital learning consultant, teacher educator, and senior lecturer specialising in educational technology, to discuss the role of AI in language education. Drawing on her research and classroom experience, Sophia highlights the importance of critical engagement with AI tools, the need to educate teachers – not just students – about technology, and the challenges and opportunities that come with integrating AI meaningfully into teaching and learning.

And then: Using digital tools to spark conversation in the EFL world:

Creativity fuelled by digital technology is transforming how EFL students learn, adapt, and connect with new languages and cultures. Henry Huang, an EFL teacher and digital humanities researcher, explains why.

Creativity in the classroom goes beyond artistic expression. It also plays a vital role in helping students develop problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and adaptability which is especially important for learners navigating new languages and cultural settings. Task-based learning (TBL) and project-based learning (PBL), which emphasise real-world tasks and collaborative learning, naturally support creative thinking. While these approaches may be well-established in some education systems, others are still working to meaningfully integrate them within the constraints of traditional structures and exam-oriented priorities.

In countries where high-stakes exams strongly influence teaching, education often focuses more on test preparation than on creativity or communication. Since speaking skills are not always prioritised in national exams, traditional methods like rote memorisation and grammar translation tend to persist. Though creativity is widely acknowledged as the pinnacle of the learning process (as seen in Bloom’s Taxonomy), integrating it meaningfully into English education remains a work in progress in many classrooms.

In education systems where digital tools are increasingly present, technology plays a growing role in shaping the EFL learning experience. It opens up new ways to engage learners in multimodal, interactive tasks that foster both language development and creativity. Whether it’s students designing visual projects, collaborating on video assignments, or reinforcing vocabulary with gamified apps, technology can support a richer learning experience than traditional methods often allow.

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algospeak: how social media influences the way we talk

As google AI tells us, in an easy definition of algorithms:

In simple terms, an algorithm is a set of step-by-step instructions for completing a task or solving a problem. These instructions are ordered and precise, like a recipe for baking a cake or the steps to making a peanut butter sandwich, and are used by computers and humans to achieve a specific outcome from a given input

Or, when it comes to algorithm: meaning in computer:

Sorting data: An algorithm can define the steps to sort a list of numbers in ascending order.

Finding a path: An algorithm can determine the shortest route on a map by calculating and comparing various paths.

Social media feeds: Algorithms in social media platforms analyze user data to recommend content, though these often involve heuristics (rules of thumb) rather than strictly correct solutions, as noted in Wikipedia.

What about algorithms and language?

Dale Shaw writes for the New World weekly magazine and has written a review of the new book  Algospeak, the language of the machine:

We invented algorithms to sort our words. Now the algorithms are teaching us how to speak

There is one meaning of this word Algospeak - Wikipedia:

In social media, algospeak is a self-censorship phenomenon in which users adopt coded expressions to evade automated content moderation.[1][2] It is used to discuss topics deemed sensitive to moderation algorithms while avoiding penalties such as shadow banning, downranking, or de-monetization of content

But it's also Algospeak (book) - Wikipedia:

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language is a 2025 non-fiction book by linguist and content creator Adam Aleksic, known online as Etymology Nerd. It explores various linguistic phenomena on the internet, including algospeak, internet slang, and linguistic innovations driven by social media algorithms.[1][2][3]

The book primarily argues that the internet and social media are driving many of recent linguistic innovations, and even crossing over to the offline world.[4] The book covers how social media algorithms—the system that determines which content will be shown to the user—drive content creators to optimize their expression for greater reach.[1] Aleksic argues for an expanded definition of algospeak to encapsulate this new way of social media-influenced expression, going beyond its original definition of the use of coded expressions to evade automated content moderation.[1]

Here are a couple of book reviews (registration needed!

In ‘Algospeak,’ Adam Aleksic, a.k.a. Etymology Nerd, writes about the ways social media is changing language - The Washington Post

Two Savvy New Books Offer Hope For the Terminally Online - The New York Times

And here's a good list of more:

All Book Marks reviews for Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic Book Marks

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replacing teachers with ai

Is AI an opportunity or a threat for teachers of language?

There are general issues around ai and the future of education - and whether AI can be seen as the 'friend of enemy' of teachers. 

To give an example, we can simply ask AI if "you can give me a lesson plan!?"

The E L Gazette looks at ELT’s AI Future: Opportunities and challenges - E L Gazette

Will AI change how we learn languages? No, it will not. And that is the end of that. But let me explain why. We know, from loads of research, that we learn through comprehensible input, which forms in our subconscious as rules of the language. These rules include phonology, collocation, syntax, morphology, and loads of other elements of language. It is also consistently refined. This process is messy, difficult to measure, and non-linear. These rules are refined through interaction and, in essence, learning through doing. Teachers cannot change the path, but they can accelerate the speed with which learning and/or acquisition takes place. It is irrelevant how much AI or the internet changes, the way in which we learn languages are almost certainly not going to change. So, let’s address that first part. Can AI, if it adheres to second language acquisition theory, replace teachers?

See also:

Jay Doubleyou: the future of ai and english language teaching

Jay Doubleyou: chat gpt in teaching/learning/working with english

Jay Doubleyou: chat gpt in teaching/learning/working with english - the research

Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part one: the dangers of chatgpt

Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part two: the dangers of deep fake imagery

Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part three: china controlling ai

Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part four: "integrating it into teaching, learning, and assessment will require careful consideration"

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practising your english speaking with chatgpt

Whilst integrating IT into teaching, learning, and assessment will require careful consideration, we will be using AI more an more in language acquisition.

For example, there has been a lot of research into the use of Chat GPT in teaching/learning/working with English. And on a practical level, we can ask AI if they can give me a lesson plan!

Finally, whilst language is indeed a human thing, we are increasingly able to have pretty good 'conversations' with AI bots.

As the AI Overview on Google suggests:

To interact with ChatGPT, you can type your prompts into the text box or use the voice conversation feature. On the mobile app, you can find the microphone icon to speak your prompts. On the web version, you can enable voice conversations in the settings and use the microphone icon or voice mode button to talk to ChatGPT. 

Here's a breakdown of how to talk to ChatGPT:

1. Using Voice on the Mobile App:

• Open the ChatGPT app and locate the message box. 
• Look for the headphone-shaped icon or the voice waveform icon on the right side of the text box. 
Tap the icon to activate voice input and choose your preferred voice from the available options. 
Start speaking your prompts, and the app will automatically detect the end of your sentences. 
To end the conversation, you can tap the circular button with a cross in the middle of the screen. 

2. Using Voice on the Web:

Go to ChatGPT.com. 
If it's your first time using advanced voice, you may need to grant browser permission to access your microphone. 
Locate the voice icon on the bottom-right of the screen and click on it. 
Choose your preferred voice and begin speaking your prompts. 
You can also use the microphone icon to enter your prompt using voice-to-text. 

3. Typing Prompts:

Regardless of whether you are using the app or the web version, you can always type your prompts into the message box. 
After typing your prompt, press enter or the send button to send it to ChatGPT. 

Key points to remember:

Speak clearly and concisely when using voice input. 
ChatGPT can handle ongoing conversations, so you can refer to previous prompts. 
You can refine your prompts by using follow-up questions or by providing additional context. 
Experiment with different prompts and approaches to find what works best for you. 

how to talk to chatgpt - Google Search

With more suggestions here from Reddit:

Talk to ChatGPT on computer : r/ChatGPTPro

Speaking practice with ChatGPT/AI : r/dreamingspanish

With some video ideas too:

Use the ChatGPT App as an English Practice Partner - YouTube

How to Practice Your English LIVE with ChatGPT - YouTube

How I make ChatGPT my English SPEAKING Partner - YouTube

ChatGPT training to practice English | 2025 - YouTube

Finally, here's the bot itself:

ChatGPT - English Speaking Practice GPT

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language is a human thing

Other species can communicate of course - but parrots speaking human languages is in fact only a matter of mimicry, because only humans can use language. 

Other 'minds' can communicate - but whilst there is a lot of promise in AI and the future of education for example, only humans can use language in the way humans do. 

Only humans can do code-switching: jumping between different registers, different voices and different languages. Only humans enjoy word play - and things such as malapropisms, spoonerisms and nonsense words. Humans love ambiguity - and ambiguity is everywhere in Englsh!

The problems around the relationship between language and thought is clearly only something humans are struggling with. It does seem to be, though, that language shapes the way we think, which is not the case with parrots or ChatGPT.

Another issue is that no matter how much 'input' we get when learning a language, there will always be the poverty of the stimulus - in other words, "there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain". 

These are theories of language learning and teaching: of behaviourism vs nativism - and look to theorist Chomsky and language acquisition and what makes us human.

And the latest edition of the Philosophy Now magazine takes a look at this:

Contemporary linguists and philosophers have formalized Descartes’ and Cordemoy’s observations about human linguistic possibility into three conditions:

Stimulus-Freedom: Humans can produce new expressions that lack any one-to-one relationship with their environments. Generally, stimuli in a human’s local environment appear to elicit utterances, but not cause them. If human language use is not affixed in some determinate, predictable fashion to stimuli, then language use is not directly caused by situations. Among other things, this means that meaningful expressions can be generated about environments far-removed from the local context in which the person speaks; or even about imaginary contexts. The contrast with animal communication is striking here. For animals, communication is restricted to the local context of its use. Human language use is, in sharp contrast, detachable: a pillar of the human intellect may be the ability to detach oneself from the circumstances in which cognitive resources are deployed without reliance on stimuli to do so. In other words, we can think for ourselves.

Unboundedness: Human language use is not confined to a pre-sorted list of words, phrases, or sentences (as it is with LLMs). Instead, there’s no fixed set of utterances humans can produce. This is the infinite productivity of human language – the unlimited combination and re-combination of finite elements into new forms that convey new, independent meanings.

Appropriateness to Circumstance: That human language use is stimulus-free can be revealing when we reflect that utterances are routinely appropriate to the situations in which they are made and coherent to others who hear them. If human language use is both stimulus-free and not caused by situations, this means its relation to one’s environment must be the more obscure relation of appropriateness. Indeed, language use “is recognized as appropriate by other participants in the discourse situation who might have reacted in similar ways and whose thoughts, evoked by this discourse, correspond to those of the speaker” (Language and Problems of Knowledge, Noam Chomsky, 1988).

Only when all three conditions are simultaneously present does language use take on its special human character. As Chomsky summarized it:

“man has a species-specific capacity, a unique type of intellectual organization which cannot be attributed to peripheral organs or related to general intelligence and which manifests itself in what we may refer to as the ‘creative aspect’ of ordinary language use – its property being both unbounded in scope and stimulus-free. Thus Descartes maintains that language is available for the free expression of thought or for appropriate response in any new context and is undetermined by any fixed association of utterances to external stimuli or physiological states (identifiable in any noncircular fashion)”
(Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, 1966).

It is a distinctively human trait to use language in a manner that is simultaneously stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate and coherent to others. Such language use is neither determined (by a stimulus) nor random (inappropriate). This ability enables people to deploy their intellectual resources to any problem, or to create new problems altogether, putting our shared cognitive capacities to use across contexts at will. It is little wonder then why Descartes assigns such importance to language use in his test for other minds. A being that uses language in only one or two of the three ways described can be explained in mechanical terms – but the presence of all three is something that modern technology lacks the tools to create.

Rescuing Mind from the Machines | Issue 168 | Philosophy Now

Or, to put it another way:

The article discusses the misconceptions of "AGI doomers" - those who believe that a future artificial general intelligence (AGI) system could rebel against humanity. The author argues that the key flaw in the doomer's argument is their failure to recognize the "creative aspect of language use" (CALU) - the uniquely human ability to use language in a stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate and coherent manner. The author contends that this extra-mechanical nature of human language and cognition is a critical characteristic that current AI systems lack, and that the doomer's assumption of an AGI system spontaneously developing such capabilities is unfounded.

What the AGI Doomers Misunderstand - Aili

This is quite a debate:

Do large language models (LLMs) use language creatively? Ample intellectual content has been produced recently over whether LLMs generate text sufficiently novel to be considered “creative” or merely synthesize creatively human-generated content without a distinctive contribution of their own. It is one dimension of a highly complex debate that is unfolding over the nature of both LLMs and human intelligence.

This saga has seen contributions from thinkers in a diversity of disciplines, including computer science, robotics, cognitive science, philosophy, and even national security. A notable flashpoint is linguist Noam Chomsky’s fiery critique of ChatGPT and LLMs in The New York Times. This controversial piece illuminates stark divides between scientific approaches to the nature of the human mind, natural and artificial intelligence (AI), and how engineering makes use (or doesn’t) of these notions.

Chomsky’s NYT piece spurred tremendous debates on this subject, as he highlighted his belief that “Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism.” The discourse which has sprung up in the wake of this and other pieces surrounds familiar arguments about the utility of generative linguistics, the role of cognitive science in AI, and even broader matters such as the emergent theory of mind capabilities in LLMs.

I find myself frustrated and baffled. This is good because otherwise, I may not have written this article. But the reasons are not stellar: Chomsky’s rigid communication style has prevented him from leveraging some of the fascinating features of his own linguistic work in a direct and explicit manner to assess LLMs’ capabilities. Conversely, machine learning researchers have so thoroughly indulged in the euphoria of the field’s recent (and real) advancements that they frequently lack the will required to assess whether human cognition is as straightforward as it seems.

I attempt to remedy this here. Where Chomsky’s approach to the mind and the tradition of generative linguistics broadly are brought into AI, they have focused intensely on familiar arguments like the poverty of the stimulus and the innateness of linguistic knowledge or principles. I instead highlight what is known in the rationalist tradition in philosophy and cognitive science as the “creative aspect of language use,” or CALU.

Do Large Language Models Have Minds Like Ours? | Towards AI

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