How to Use AI to Apply Bloom’s Taxonomy to ESL Teaching

As an ESL teacher, you’re always looking for ways to keep your students engaged, help them grow, and make sure they truly understand the English language. You want them to move beyond just memorizing vocabulary and grammar rules. Well, that’s where Bloom’s taxonomy comes in.

You probably know about it already, but Bloom’s taxonomy is a tool that can help you guide your students through deeper levels of learning—taking them from just remembering vocabulary words all the way to creating their own stories or projects in English. Sounds like something you could use, right?

The problem is, incorporating this framework in your class may not be easy, especially if you don’t have proper resources. Time could also be a bottleneck. Thankfully, the recent development in AI can be your digital assistant.

Here’s how.

What is Bloom’s taxonomy?

In case you’re not familiar with the framework, let’s learn what it is. In simple terms, it’s a framework that breaks down learning into six levels of thinking. These levels range from remembering basic facts to creating new ideas or projects. The hierarchy includes:

1. Remembering: At this level, your students can recall facts, terms, or concepts they’ve learned.
2. Understanding: At this level, your students can explain ideas or concepts in your own words and show that they truly get what something means.
3. Applying: This is when your students can take what they have learned and use it in real-life situations.
4. Analyzing: At this stage, your students can break things down, look at parts and patterns, and see how everything fits together.
5. Evaluating: This is when your students are capable of making judgments, forming opinions, and justifying their reasoning with evidence.
6. Creating: This is the highest level, where your students bring together ideas to create something new or original.

The idea is that your students move from the simplest level (just remembering) to more complex tasks, like creating something new. Each level builds on the one before it, helping them develop higher-order thinking skills along the way.

How can you apply Bloom’s taxonomy to your ESL class?

You might be wondering, “How can I actually use this for my students?”

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

Let’s walk through each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy and see how you can apply it to real lessons in your English class.

Remembering (Getting the basics down)

At this level, your goal is simple: help your students recall essential vocabulary, grammar rules, or facts. It’s all about getting those basics into their heads so they can build on them later.

Activity example

You could give your students a list of new words and ask them to match each word to its meaning. Or, maybe give them sentences with blanks and have them fill in the correct word. This reinforces their vocabulary and helps them remember the material more effectively.

Understanding (Getting your students to explain it)

Once your students can remember key vocabulary or grammar, the next step is to ensure they truly understand what they’re learning. Encourage them to explain things in their own words, or interpret what they read.

Activity example

After reading a short story, have your students summarize it in their own words or explain what they think a specific idiom means. This will help them process the language and check their understanding.

Applying (Putting it into practice)

Now, you want your students to use their knowledge in new, practical situations. This is where you can get creative and really push them to use their English in real-life scenarios.

Activity example

Give them a role-playing activity where they have to act out a situation—like ordering food at a restaurant, making small talk at a party, or asking for directions. This not only helps them practice their language skills, but it also boosts their confidence in using English in everyday settings.

Analyzing (Breaking it down)

At this level, your students should be able to look at the language more critically—examining how things fit together and drawing connections between ideas.

Activity example

Ask your students to compare two different English articles or stories.

How are the writing styles different? What’s the tone of each?

Or, you could break down a sentence and have them identify the subject, verb, and objects. This helps them become more aware of how language works.

Evaluating (Making judgments)

Here’s where you start challenging your students to think critically and form their own opinions based on what they’ve learned. This is about making judgments and backing them up with reasons.

Activity example

Present them with a controversial topic. For example: "Should schools have uniforms?"

Then ask them to argue their point in English, explaining why they agree or disagree. This encourages them to think deeply and use evidence to support their opinions.

Creating

At the highest level, your students should be able to create something original using their language skills. This could be a story, a presentation, a video, or any other creative project.

Activity example

Have your students write a short story using new vocabulary or grammar rules they’ve learned. Or, challenge them to work in groups to create a skit or a short video in English. This pushes them to synthesize everything they’ve learned and use it in a creative way.

How can you use AI to apply Bloom’s taxonomy to your ESL materials?

The approach you can take here depends on the types of ESL materials you use in your class, but in most cases, you probably need different lesson plans, worksheets, presentation slides, and question sets.

Let’s take a look at 3 key ways you can use AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot to create these materials.

Create lesson plans

Creating ESL lesson plans with AI tools is pretty simple and can be highly effective. You just need to specify the details you want, and it can help design a detailed plan that meets your teaching objectives.

As you can guess, the simplest tip here is to mention in your prompt that you want your lesson plan to match Bloom’s taxonomy. However, a teaching-focused prompting strategy will give you better results.

With Monsha, creating a lesson plan that incorporates Bloom’s taxonomy is even easier. In fact, you can do it with a single click! And that’s just one small part of it. You have many more options to define your requirements, which will make your ESL lesson plans better. For example:

• Your students’ grade level
• What to include in the lesson plan (e.g., Objectives & Lesson Outcomes)
• Duration of the class

Create worksheets

Whether your students are at the Remembering level of Bloom’s taxonomy or the Analyzing level, you can generate different types of exercise tests for them. For example:

• Multiple choice
• Fill-in-the-blank
• True/false
• Matching words

As usual, your prompts to generate your worksheets will be the key here. So be as specific as possible.

If you’re using Monsha, you don’t have to rely on detailed prompts at all. Instead, you can get started with just a topic. So you’ll be able to create your ESL worksheets in the easiest way.

Create discussion topics and stories

This is probably where ChatGPT or Copilot shines. You can use them to create stories based around your students’ context and interests. If your students are comfortable with the idea, include their names in the stories.

It’s also possible for you to encourage deeper thinking and class discussion with AI tools’ help. Use them to generate thought-provoking discussion questions on literature, current events, or cultural topics.

Here’s a basic prompt template for your use:

"I need a set of ESL discussion topics for my class based on [specific subject/theme] (e.g., daily routines, travel, food, environment, etc.). The students are in [grade] / at [level], and I want to use Bloom's Taxonomy to structure the topics. Suggest topics and questions that span the following cognitive levels:

Remembering: Topics and questions that will help my students recall facts or vocabulary.

Understanding: Topics and questions that will encourage my students to explain ideas.

Applying: Topics and questions that will require my students to use the information in real-life situations.

Analyzing: Topics and questions that will ask my students to compare, contrast, or identify patterns.

Evaluating: Topics and questions that will require my students to form opinions, make judgments, or critique something.

Creating: Topics and questions that will encourage my students to make something new, like planning or designing.

Please ensure that the topics and questions are clear, appropriate for ESL learners, and designed to encourage both fluency and accuracy. Also, keep the language level in mind, using vocabulary and sentence structures that are suitable for [grade] / [level] students."

How Monsha makes it easy for you to adopt Bloom’s taxonomy

There is no doubt that ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and other AI chatbots are powerful tools. However, the fine-tuning required to get effective results from them may take a lot of time and prompts, especially when it involves an educational framework like Bloom’s taxonomy. That’s where you can benefit from Monsha the most.

Regardless of the ESL resources you want to create, you can adapt them to Bloom’s taxonomy with Monsha. You can even design an entire ESL course, thanks to the extensive set of education-focused AI tools it offers! The best part? You can do it all in a few intuitive steps. No additional prompting required, unless you decide to go for it. So the next time you want to create any ESL material, give Monsha a try!

‍