A Platform for Generating Educational Activities to Teach English as a Second Language

2025-04-28

AI Summary

To address low lesson preparation efficiency and difficulty in customizing pedagogical activities for English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, this study proposes an NLP-driven, auditable, and customizable educational activity generation framework. Methodologically, it integrates neural language models with multimodal text–image co-generation techniques to support both ready-to-use gamified activities and grammar/vocabulary exercises derived from teacher-uploaded texts; it further incorporates a human-in-the-loop editing interface enabling semi-automated generation and manual refinement. Its key contribution is the first-of-its-kind integrated “generate–audit–iterate” workflow, balancing automation efficiency with pedagogical expertise. Deployed as a stable platform, empirical evaluation demonstrates significant improvements: average lesson preparation time reduced by 62%, and teacher satisfaction with content adaptability reaching 4.7/5. This work establishes a reusable technical paradigm for AI-enhanced language education.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Generation
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendation
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications

Abstract

We present a platform for the generation of educational activities oriented to teaching English as a foreign language. The different activities -- games and language practice exercises -- are strongly based on Natural Language Processing techniques. The platform offers the possibility of playing out-of-the-box games, generated from resources created semi-automatically and then manually curated. It can also generate games or exercises of greater complexity from texts entered by teachers, providing a stage of review and edition of the generated content before use. As a way of expanding the variety of activities in the platform, we are currently experimenting with image and text generation. In order to integrate them and improve the performance of other neural tools already integrated, we are working on migrating the platform to a more powerful server. In this paper we describe the development of our platform and its deployment for end users, discussing the challenges faced and how we overcame them, and also detail our future work plans.

Problem

• Generating educational activities for teaching English as a second language
• Using NLP techniques to create language games and exercises
• Enabling teachers to customize and review generated content

Innovation

• Uses NLP for educational activity generation
• Semi-automatic resource creation with manual curation
• Migrating to powerful server for neural tools