Innovation in Language Learning
Creation and Implementation of AI-Generated Educational Videos for an Information Technology Glossary in English for Specific Purposes Courses
Andreja Kovačić, University of Zagreb (Croatia)
Goran Bubaš, University of Zagreb (Croatia)
Abstract
Artificial intelligence tools for generating videos have recently become relatively inexpensive for creating brief, high-quality videos that contain speech and sound. Such videos can depict specific and complex scenes, including those in real-world professional settings. For English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction, these affordances create a novel opportunity for custom-made educational multimodal materials or modules adapted to specialized topics, vocabulary, and lesson segments. This paper provides a preliminary report on the creation and implementation of a glossary for two ESP courses related to Information Technology (IT) and Software Engineering. In creating the glossary, the video-generating feature of the Google Gemini AI tool was utilized. The main idea was to represent key technical terms extracted from course teaching materials and exams. Each generated glossary-related video contained three to five technical terms contextualized in a brief dialogue between actors. The videos were made available on the course webpages within a learning management system (LMS) and embedded as lessons based on microlearning pedagogy, together with brief textual descriptions of the included technical terms. Such an approach to integrating AI-generated videos provided students and the instructor with: (a) a means of learning or consolidating technical terms; (b) an appealing online learning resource that students could use to expand their lexical knowledge and improve their comprehension of course material. In addition, the glossary was conceived as an informal tool for initial assessment or self-assessment of students’ familiarity with technical jargon, since it was implemented at the beginning of the ESP courses in the first semester and study year. Finally, owing to the quality pronunciation of the technical terms in the videos—all of them pronounced in American English —students were also exposed to target ESP vocabulary in an audio (multimedia) format and given an opportunity to check and improve their pronunciation of selected technical terms. This opportunity for pronunciation self-training is particularly noteworthy since, at the beginning of the course, at least half of the students’ demonstrated inadequate pronunciation of technical terms.
Keywords: English for Specific Purposes, GenAI Tools Integration, Video Glossary, Technical Jargon, Pronunciation
