Chatting with Chatbots in L2 English: The UNITE Guidelines

The project UNiversally Inclusive Technologies to Practice English – UNITE explores the applications of dialogue systems, namely chatbots, as artificial intelligence–based agents for practicing English as a second/foreign language among Italian-speaking university students of non-linguistic/language subject, including those with and without disabilities and Specific Learning Disorders. The present Guidelines respond to the project objective related to producing teaching materials for the integration of chatbots into English language courses. Within the framework of these Guidelines, chatbots are intended as conversational partners for practicing written English, while their other possible uses in language teaching and learning contexts are not considered. The Guidelines are informed by a corpus of learner-chatbot interactions and by the responses provided by the learners in a post-interaction questionnaire; evidence-based suggestions are provided on some of the aspects that emerged during data collection and analysis, without aiming at exhaustiveness. The specific chatbots involved are ChatGPT and Pi.ai.