I used the AI tools Deepseek and Le Chat (Mistral AI) to help me write this - a great example of cognitive offloading, as you'll see. So what is cognitive offloading and what implications are there for our work as language teachers and teacher educators? Cognitive offloading is the process of using physical actions or external tools to reduce the immediate cognitive demand of a task. It's the act of shifting the burden of mental processing from your brain onto the environment to free up mental resources. A simple everyday example would be to use a calculator to do simple arithmetic. I've also come across the term auxiliary memory, to describe tools like phones and notebooks where we can store information so we don't hae to worry about holding it in memopry. Call it freeing up cognitive space, if you like, or "letting tools do the work for you". Everyday examples include: Writing a list: Instead of trying to remember 10 grocery items, you write them down. Yo...
Always remember how good information gap tasks are! This one generates listening, reading, speaking and factual, cultiral knowledge for the A-level exam. Just sit back and watch your B1/2 level students (Y13 in England) listen and speak! I used Le Chat (Mistral AI) to generate the texts and questions, just doing a few vocab glosses if words were likley not to be understood. I asked for level B1. le Chat works as well as Chat GPT for this sort of resource creation and comes with less political baggage. The topic is how French charities support migrants and I would have very happily set this as a task for an A-level (Y13) class. If you have an odd number in the group, just create one group of three where two students share the same text and take tuns asking the questions. This is a sort of variation on my 'Ask the Experts' tasks on the site, but this has the advantage that you can do it with a very samll group — as few as two! Here is my resource — you could get AI to create si...