The experience of implementing the Twee platform for news articles in classes of English for specific purposes

Problem Statement . In vocational English classes, a lot of attention has traditionally and reasonably been paid to subject-related news articles. Artificial intelligence (AI) based platforms, and particularly the Twee resource, are able to facilitate the teacher’s work in this regard. However, there is not enough research on the effectiveness of this resource, especially in the context of teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP), namely Maritime English. The purpose of this study is to analyze the way the Twee resource handles news texts, to evaluate its benefits for teachers, and to determine which of its functions are most important in classes planning. Methodology. Reviews and analyzes the examples of specific tasks generated with the help of Twee resource on the basis of maritime news texts, the most successful of which have been used in classes for senior students studying Transport Process Technologies at State University of Maritime and Inland Shipping (SUMIS), as well as provides an overview of maritime news periodicals suitable for classroom use. Results. The experience of using the Twee resource in preparing ESP classes has shown that the platform is prompt and to some degree successful in generating tasks based on news articles, though some of the tasks do not prove to be accurate. A greater number of challenges are found in reading comprehension tasks, as well as in vocabulary activities involving polysemantic lexical units. Conversely, pre-reading tasks as well as follow-up assignments have proved to be the most successful. Conclusion. The Twee resource, along with other AI-based platforms, can significantly facilitate the teacher’s work when preparing for classes and is reasonably popular among English language teachers. Despite this fact it is still the teacher who should verify the results of the platform’s work and who determines the success of using the tasks created with the help of AI.