Prompt Engineering in English Language Teaching: Theory and Practice

The article presents the concept of “prompt engineering” as an important component of modern practice of interaction with artificial intelligence (AI) models, especially in educational and teaching and learning environments. A brief historical overview into the development of AI technologies and the gradual formation of the art of Prompt Engineering, the main goal of which is to obtain the most relevant and accurate response of an AI model through correctly written instructions, is proposed. Key concepts related to Prompt Engineering are formulated and its features are highlighted as a new interdisciplinary tool located at the intersection of linguistics, pedagogy, cognitive psychology and information technology. Special attention is paid to the process of creating effective prompts (queries), rules of their construction, common mistakes and techniques of their writing taking into account the goals of learners (users) and the nature of the task. The theoretical part is accompanied by detailed practical examples of using these techniques and their combinations in teaching a foreign language at non-language universities. The article describes a step-by-step algorithm that allows to adapt a large amount of educational material for the purposes of interim or final certification in the discipline “English for professional purposes”, including the generation of texts of different levels of lexical and grammatical complexity, mental maps and means of self-control. The article contains practical recommendations for organising independent work with AI models for students with different levels of language proficiency, motivation, chosen learning strategy and intellectual readiness for learning. It concludes with the results of the application of the described prompt-engineering techniques and analyses their potential impact on the quality of learning, achievement, engagement and development of learners’ linguistic independence.