Students’ Perspective and Challenge towards Utilization of Talkpal.AI in ESP Classroom
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been brought into English classroom to assist learning process. Many studies have been conducted to find out the effectiveness of AI in English language classroom. Yet, there is a few studies which discuss the use of AI in ESP classroom. This study presents the use of Talkpal.AI, AI language learning platform, in teaching ESP for the fourth semester students in Pratama Mulia Polytechnic. They are from Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Accounting, and Office Management program which consist of 40 students. The aims of this study is to find out students’ perception in implementing Talkpal.AI in their ESP classroom, to find out challenges faced by students, and the effectiveness of Talkpal.AI. Qualitative method is applied in this study by gaining data from questionnaire and interview. The results of this study show that the students have positive and negative perception towards Talkpal.AI. They find out that: 1) it is a fun, helpful, and exciting application but some activities are boring; 2) it lacks of ESP materials; 3) it has daily progress check. Moreover, the students also describe some obstacles such as: 1) payment and subscription; 2) unstable internet connection; 3) cellphone storage. From the findings of this research, it can be concluded that Talkpal.AI is effectively able to assist students to practice English for their daily life yet it is less effective to be applied in ESP context. The researcher suggests the solution to overcome this problem is for developer to create a similar AI application specifically for ESP field which covers various ways to learn ESP.
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