A prototype authoring tool for editing authentic texts using LLMs to increase support for contextualised L2 grammar practice

Abstract

ICALL systems that offer grammar exercises with authentic texts have the potential to motivate learners, but finding suitable documents can be problematic because of the low number of target grammar forms they typically contain. Meanwhile, research showing the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to rewrite texts in controlled ways is emerging, and this begs the question of whether or not they can be used to modify authentic L2 texts to increase their suitability for grammar learning. In this paper we present a tool we have developed to explore this idea. The authoring tool employs a lexical database to create prompts that instruct an LLM to insert specific target forms into the text. We share our plans to evaluate the quality of the automatically modified texts based on human judgments from native speakers.