A Comparative Study of Students’ Perceptions on ChatGPT and Machine Translators

This study examines the impact of ChatGPT compared to traditional machine translators on university students’ English writing and speaking skills, perceptions, and preferences. Conducted with 23 freshmen in a College English course, the research utilized surveys to assess changes in learners’ abilities, confidence, satisfaction, and tool preferences before and after incorporating AI tools. The findings reveal that ChatGPT significantly improved students’ self-reported writing and speaking skills, confidence, and satisfaction, surpassing the effectiveness of traditional machine translators. While machine translators were valued for their ease of use and grammatical accuracy, they hindered self-directed learning and proficiency improvement. In contrast, ChatGPT offered advanced capabilities, including grammar correction, natural sentence refinement, and learning support, but faced limitations such as occasional inaccuracies and dependency risks. Despite the study’s limited scope and absence of direct language proficiency evaluations, it highlights the potential of the tools in language education. Future research should explore their broader impact, including their influence on the four language skills and their integration with other AI tools to enhance language learning outcomes.