Integrating ChatGPT Into a Culture-Focused Flipped Curriculum for Chinese as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This chapter explores ChatGPT's potential for assisting in a culture-focused flipped curriculum to facilitate the development of intercultural communicative competence, a core value of foreign language education in the 21st century. Three experiments assess ChatGPT's performance in generating scenarios and performance scripts for practicing intercultural communication in Chinese-speaking contexts. While ChatGPT demonstrates remarkable linguistic accuracy and comprehension abilities, it struggles to generate scripts that reflect communicative strategies specific to Chinese-speaking contexts, especially when the prompt lacks explicit instructions about Chinese cultural expectations. The limitation can be rooted in ChatGPT's training and the user's ineffective prompting. The findings suggest that ChatGPT is better suited as a reference tool than a primary learning resource in the curriculum. The implications for foreign language education and the integration of AI are also discussed.