Want to practice your Spanish? This Claude-powered chatbot can help
Monica Canavan used Claude Premium to create AI chatbot characters that can help students with their conversational Spanish.
Her story reads like the script of a television drama. Twenty seven-year-old Daniela’s life was interrupted by a pregnancy after she was pressured by family to become a surrogate for her sister, who was suffering from an autoimmune disease that prevented her from carrying her own child.
The pregnancy was high-risk, forcing Daniela to take time off work and derailing her fledgling career in digital marketing. It was hard for her to date or go out with friends while carrying her sister’s child.
Talking to someone like Daniela about such a difficult experience can be challenging. Imagine doing that when you’re not a native Spanish speaker. But that’s exactly what those studying Spanish at Northeastern University are doing to improve their fluency and understanding of cultural issues in South America.
The catch? Daniela isn’t real. She’s a chatbot created by Northeastern principal Spanish lecturer Yanet Monica Canavan.
Canavan, who teaches elementary and advanced Spanish, took advantage of the free premium Claude access provided to all Northeastern students, faculty and staff and used the AI assistant to create different chatbots students can converse with to practice their Spanish.
“Everybody’s using AI more and more,” Canavan told Northeastern Global News. “So why not use it in a way that is good for them?”
Canavan has always embraced experiential learning through technology and community engagement. In the past, she’s created a virtual reality in which students can “explore” the Galapagos Islands, and partnered with universities in Peru so her classes can practice Spanish with native speakers via Zoom.
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However, she found that many of her students were embarrassed to make mistakes when practicing with a native Spanish speaker. Others were equally intimidated when practicing Spanish with classmates. Creating a chatbot seemed like the perfect solution to give students a more comfortable and safe space for learning.
“AI is a tool like any other tool, but it has a lot of benefits,” Canavan said. “Students become autonomous learners. They know what they want to learn and they practice when they want … with no judgment.”
To create the chatbot, Canavan taught herself how to feed the right information to the AI assistant to create characters for her courses that not only have the ability to engage students, but also speak Spanish like a native. Each character uses regional words and terms from their country and can explain slang to students, which Canavan said prepares them for interacting with native Spanish speakers in real life.
The chatbots are also programmed to speak at the appropriate level of Spanish, depending on the course level and the students’ proficiency level.
For her Elementary Spanish students, for instance, Canavan crafted an AI conversation partner for discussing everyday topics like their family and asking for directions. Students in more advanced Spanish classes, AI-crafted hiring managers from six companies across Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Peru, Colombia and Chile allowed the students to practice salary negotiations.
Canavan also made chatbots with characters from ancient Indigenous civilizations. Students can talk to a Mayan weaver about life in ancient Mexico or ask a member of the Mapuches from Chile and Argentina about the gods they worship.
The chatbots can also teach students vocabulary and if the learners don’t know a word, they can ask for an explanation.
Daniela is a character in “Voces del Vientre” (Voices of the Womb), an interactive conversation platform where Canavan’s advanced Spanish students can speak with women from six different South American countries about their experience with gestational surrogacy. Each country embodies a different ethical principle explored in an academic article that students read about surrogacy which can be a controversial topic in some areas. Canavan said she designed this activity to give students the chance to further explore the topics raised in the article, including bodily autonomy, justice and personal freedom around the issue.
Grayson Lao, a first-year mechanical engineering student in Spanish for Global Professionals, an advanced level course, was initially skeptical about the use of AI in the classroom. But he walked away from a conversation with Canavan’s chatbots with a stronger grasp of vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure — something he doesn’t feel he could have gained through studying a textbook or flashcards.
“The use of AI…on paper, seemed sort of unhelpful,” Lao, 19, told NGN. “However…applied in a setting like this, [AI chatbots] prove helpful in understanding another language and can provide great feedback and tips.”
After their interactions, students generate reports of their conversations to demonstrate their progress, which Canavan monitors through a teacher dashboard. So far, she said she’s seen a difference. Engaging with these chatbots allows students to come to class with more confidence.
“When you’re confident that you know something, you are eager to practice more,” Canavan added.
Lao said he was extremely nervous conducting a mock interview activity in Spanish. Practicing with the chatbot ahead of time helped him feel more assured before interacting with others, he said.
“Speaking with a chatbot compared to another human provides a risk-free environment (with) honest and forgiving feedback,” he said. “This prepared me for the in-class activity and allowed insight into what a real conversation might look like.”
