Creating Stories

Abstract

This chapter focuses on examining the strengths and limitations of prompt-driven ChatGPT for a creative writing task using German as a foreign language. College students of German at the advanced level were asked to develop, write, and illustrate a unique children's story using ChatGPT as a thinking partner. Interacting with ChatGPT in German, students engaged in informal and low-stakes writing-to-learn activities that could help them think through ideas and key concepts for their stories, as well as learn new vocabulary, expressions, and language patterns. Answering to learner-produced prompts, ChatGPT provided both explicit and implicit learning situations that focused on vocabulary development and grammar in a meaning-focused context, creating conditions in which learners could learn according to their current language proficiency. The author discusses how they set up the project, what tasks and prompts they used to elicit content, and how they prepared illustrations using an artificial intelligence image generator.