ChatGPT Read My Book

​ChatGPT Read My Book 

After several years of toying with the idea of writing a book of dialogues to teach phrasal verbs, Discovering Phrasal Verbs: The Dialogues, is now under revision, and I’m piloting some of the dialogues along with their accompanying creative and critical thinking tasks with my students.

The dialogues are structured to showcase the natural, often slippery uses of phrasal verbs in context. They are often elliptical, emotionally coloured, and sometimes complex. There are no mechanical drills, rote learning, matching tests or gapfills. 

Recently, I needed to find a dialogue that already contained three uses of the simple past:

• past for time (temporal)
• past for imagination (hypothetical)
• past for politeness (social)

It would have taken me quite some time to skim and scan the book to locate such a dialogue manually. ChatGPT found it in seconds. From the Tomatoes dialogue:

• We binge-watched all those films. → past for time
• If I lounged about all day, I’d end up hating myself. → past for hypothetical
• You wouldn’t mind if I copied your homework, would you? → past for politeness

I asked ChatGPT how it managed to read the whole book and select that one dialogue so quickly. It gave a wonderfully articulate answer:

• It didn’t read the book line by line — it used internal search tools to scan for simple past verb forms and contextual cues, e.g. verbs of memory, regret, or reflection.
• It looked for emotional or psychological distancing, references to past scenarios, and speaker attitudes that signal remoteness.
• Because it has encountered thousands of pedagogical texts, it could quickly identify which dialogues had the right patterns and then frame them through the lens I’d specified: not just past tense, but past used in these specific functions.

The follow-up discussion with ChatGPT included some howlers. It misidentified functions, confused categories, and offered some confidently wrong grammar. It took a bit of steering to get it back on track. But that we did and it was thoroughly worthwhile. 

I like using ChatGPT as a collaborator and especially as a sounding board when bouncing ideas around. 

Members of my mailing list can download the PDF of the Tomatoes chapter.  

Mailing list sign up