Puvana Gnanasagaran

Why thinking feels hard Let’s be honest. Most of us have had that moment in class. You ask what feels like a good question. Something open-ended. Something that should get students thinking. Maybe, ‘Do you agree?’ or ‘Why do you think the writer said this?’ or ‘Whose point of view is missing here?’ And then what comes back is either silence, a very safe answer or something lifted almost word for word from the text. It is tempting to think the problem is motivation. Or effort. Or that students just do not want to think deeply. But the truth is more...

The day the essays started sounding . . . identical Last month, one of my in-service teachers handed me a draft email that was, on paper, excellent. The grammar was tidy. The tone was polite. The structure was textbook perfect. And yet, it sounded like nobody. No warmth, no specific situation, no sense of the person writing it. When I asked, the teacher smiled and said, ‘I used a chatbot. I just changed a few words’. That moment is becoming familiar in ELT. Generative AI (GenAI) can draft almost any text in seconds, and our learners know it. The question is...