How ESL Teachers Use AI to Create Weekly Discussion Question Sets

Every Monday morning I generate my conversation questions for the entire week. Five minutes. That's it. Here's exactly what the workflow looks like.

The Monday Morning Routine

I open ChalkLab and generate discussion questions for each day's topic. My intermediate class in Austin meets four days a week, and each day has a conversation warm-up. That's four sets of 5-8 questions -- about 25 questions total.

Before AI, I'd spend Sunday evening writing these. Sometimes I'd recycle old ones because I ran out of time. Now I generate fresh sets that connect to whatever we're studying that week.

How I Structure the Week

• Monday: Warm-up questions about the weekly theme. Easy, personal, low-stakes. "What do you know about [topic]?"
• Tuesday: Questions that connect to the day's reading or listening. "Based on what we read, do you agree that...?"
• Wednesday: Deeper discussion questions. Opinion-based, debate-friendly. Students have enough vocabulary by now.
• Thursday: Review questions that ask students to synthesize the week. "What was the most surprising thing you learned about [topic]?"

The Prompts I Actually Use

I don't just type "give me questions." My ChalkLab prompts look like this: "Generate 6 B1 discussion questions about public transportation. Include 2 warm-up questions, 2 opinion questions, and 2 questions that require students to describe a personal experience."

Specifying the question types matters. Without it, AI tends to generate all opinion questions, which gets repetitive. Mixing question types keeps the conversation dynamic and gives different students a chance to shine.

What I Do After Generating

Quick scan for weird phrasing. Remove any question that could only be answered with "yes" or "no." Check that vocabulary matches what we've covered. Paste into a Google Doc organized by day. Print or project.

Total time including the scan: about five minutes on Monday morning while my coffee brews. Compare that to the 45 minutes it used to take on Sunday night.

Building on This Over Time

After a full semester, I've got a Google Drive folder with 16 weeks of discussion question sets, organized by theme and level. Next semester, I can reuse the best ones, regenerate the weak ones, and have a head start on every unit. The AI does the first draft. Time does the curation. For the tools I use, see my conversation question tools guide.