Exploring English Vocabulary Learning of Vietnamese Secondary School Students with VoiceGPT Assistance

Abstract

With the advent of AI chatbots, many teachers’ teaching practices of English as a foreign language have undergone many changes. Many of them have become accustomed to employing ChatGPT to assist their work, bringing many benefits and potential challenges that, to date, have yet to be fully tested in any aspect. Particularly, two notable research gaps involve how Vietnamese secondary school students use VoiceGPT, the Vietnamese version of ChatGPT, to assist them in learning new English words and how they perceive this support. The current case study aimed to address these gaps by employing a quasi-experimental design at Lam Son Secondary School in Ho Chi Minh City with the participation of ten sixth-grade students in two English-intensive classes. In this investigation, the teacher used the Presentation-Practice-Production teaching method to teach vocabulary to her students, who were randomly assigned into two groups with the same number of members in each group, and the data for analysis was collected from their writing samples and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that sixth-grade students had different ways of using VoiceGPT to help them learn English words. The participants with VoiceGPT assistance outperformed those without this A.I. support in terms of lexical performance in the writing productions on five topics surveyed. In addition, they expressed favorable attitudes toward VoiceGPT’s benefits, but some concerns were raised about login difficulties, vocabulary range, and long response time.