A corpus-based approach to developing vocabulary curriculum materials for Indigenous youth: AI-generated versus human-created content

Given inequitable access to learning resources caused by socioeconomic and historical issues, many Indigenous students have fallen behind grade expectations. This is in particular critical at the high school level, with increased academic English language demands in their learning of content areas. This paper reports on an exploratory study using corpus analysis that examined Indigenous students’ vocabulary use in verbal narratives, a spoken corpus—the representation of adolescent oral language competence at the school. It evaluated the feasibility, in terms of vocabulary coverages, of using both human-created and AI-generated narrative curriculum materials with enriched vocabulary to support culturally responsive vocabulary instruction. The study was conducted in an Indigenous high school in Canada, located in a remote First Nation community where most students spoke Ojibwe as their first language. The results found that Indigenous students’ narratives used a significant percentage of the first 1000 high frequency words and a small percentage of the second 1000 high frequency and academic words. Human-created and AI-generated narratives had a significantly higher percentage of the second 1000 high frequency words than Indigenous students’ narratives. Finally, AI-generated narratives contained a significantly higher percentage of academic words than both Indigenous youth’s and human-created narratives. The implications of the findings indicate that a data-driven corpus-based language pedagogy can be effective developing in innovative vocabulary instructional materials for future CALL interventions to support Indigenous youths. This can be achieved in light of culturally responsive pedagogy by leveraging Indigenous oral literacy traditions of storytelling, the youths’ narrative skills and their interests and aspirations. The present study has shown that some AI tools, along with carefully piloted prompts, have the capacity to efficiently co-develop vocabulary instructional content.