THE USE OF CHATGPT IN TEACHING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: IMPACT ON STUDENTS’ COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Melnichuk Marina V., Belogash Marina A.

The article presents the results of a psychological and pedagogical study of the impact of using ChatGPT on the cognitive skills of university students in the process of learning a foreign language in order to identify the potential opportunities for the effective use ChatGPT in teaching and prevent negative consequences of its use. The theoretical part of the study takes a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the fundamental principles of the widely known learning theories, as well as the most important cognitive skills for learning a foreign language. The practical part of the study analyzes the results of a survey of undergraduate students about their quantitative and qualitative use of ChatGPT in learning a foreign language. The analysis revealed that most students use ChatGPT to complete tasks that require significant cognitive efforts and do not use the capabilities of this application to improve their level of foreign language proficiency. The authors conclude that the introduction of IT and AI advances into higher education requires teachers to simultaneously use and guide the student’s dialogue with artificial intelligence in order to effectively use its advantages, neutralize its negative impact and find new interesting forms of work to achieve educational goals.

Keywords:psychological and pedagogical theories of learning; cognitive development; ChatGPT; productive types of speech activity; reproductive types of speech activity.