Tales with Tails: AI Image Generation to Enhance Storytelling in Language Classrooms

By Seoah Yun, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Eda Yildirimer, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.69732/TTGI4191

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) has undeniably become an integral part of our lives, offering significant benefits such as simplifying daily activities and providing valuable support for learners (Loeckx, 2016). Considering its evident benefits in education, teachers have leveraged AI in diverse ways to create cost-effective teaching materials and engage students with innovative technology (Li, 2020). Teachers have also started to incorporate AI text-to-image generators (Chekhratova, 2024), despite some potential drawbacks stemming from copyright challenges, misrepresentation, and the lack of contextualization (Vigna-Taglianti, 2024).

Given these insights, our project focuses on incorporating AI image generation into language learning classrooms by developing a comprehensive five-day lesson unit plan. Throughout this unit, students utilize AI image generation as a tool to visualize the stories they craft, bridging the gap between technology and creative expression in their learning experiences. In order to address the limitations mentioned, we adapted the prompting method proposed by Ahmad and Ruslan (2024), which includes elements such as subject, attributes, context, style, lighting and mood, action, and additional components for relevant pictures. We also implemented a systematic process of reviewing and refining prompts to enhance their relevance to the context of the stories being told, encouraging students to revise them until they achieved the desired image output, which is proven to be a critical step in the process of generating desired outcomes (Gartner & Romanov, 2023).

Overview

In “Tales with Tails,” students use the present tense and past tense to create two narratives. In the case of the example for this article, one of the perspectives is from a dog owner who is spending the day preparing for a party, and the other perspective is from the dog. The dog owner’s narrative is written in the third person, while the dog’s narrative is in the first person. 

While this specific scenario was chosen for this lesson, teachers can easily adapt it to suit their students’ interests and their learning needs. For example, instead of limiting themselves to a dog, students can choose their own characters for the story (e.g., mythical creatures). Below is an overview of a possible scenario with the main idea for the narratives.

Perspective 1: Present Tense – Third Person	Perspective 2: Past Tense – First Person
Main Character: The Dog Owner (Randy)	Main Character: The Dog (Soba)
Event: Soba’s birthday party Randy is narrating his day as he prepares for his dog Soba’s birthday. (e.g., Randy wakes up and decides to make a list of things he needs to buy at the store today for his dog Soba’s birthday.)	Event: Soba’s birthday party Soba recounts his birthday, thinking about how happy he was that Randy held a birthday party for him and his friends came to celebrate him. (e.g., I ate a custom cake that was in the shape of a dog bone. It tasted like beef jerky!)

Note: Once students have outlined and composed their narratives, they use an AI image generator tool (Fusion Brain) to illustrate their stories. This integration of text and images is a core part of the project and is detailed in the plan below.

Assignment Guidelines

To complete the project, students plan and write their dual-perspective story and then create AI-generated images to turn it into a picture storybook. Students need to decide on the following elements in order to develop their story: 

The Event

The event serves as the central theme or conflict of the story. It is what drives the plot and keeps the reader engaged. The event could be:

• A mystery 
  • Example: After their dog begins digging at the same spot in the backyard every night, a young owner uncovers an old buried box that leads them to investigate a long-forgotten family secret.
• An adventure
  • Example: When a camping trip goes wrong, a lost dog and its owner must journey through the forest together, facing unexpected obstacles to find their way back to the tent.
• A personal struggle
  • Example: On the day of his big school presentation, a nervous boy feels overwhelmed until a walk with his dog in the morning helps him calm down and gain the confidence he needs to speak in front of his class. The story will be focused on the dog trying to calm the boy down.
• A historical or futuristic incident
  • Example: In a futuristic city where pets are replaced by robotic companions, a girl fights to keep her real dog after a new law bans non-digital animals.

Students should be encouraged to think about what excites or interests them. Make sure they consider how the event will impact the characters. Also, they need to keep in mind that there should be a beginning, middle, and end that could be told using both present tense as well as past tense.

The Characters

Characters should be well-developed and relatable to them. Stories could include:

• Protagonist (Main Character): The character who experiences the event and faces challenges.
• Antagonist (Optional): A character or force that opposes the protagonist. This could be a rival, an inner conflict, or even nature.
• Supporting Characters: Friends, family members, mentors, or sidekicks who help or hinder the main character.

Tell students that the characters should have names, personalities, and unique traits as well as their motivations—why do they act the way they do?

The Storyline 

The storyline is the detailed sequence of events that shapes the narrative. Stories could follow the structure below:

Beginning – Introduction

• Introduce the main character(s) and the setting.
• Provide background information and establish the theme.
• Present the main event or conflict that starts the action.

Middle (Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action)

Rising Action

• The character faces obstacles, challenges, or conflicts.
• Develop suspense, drama, or emotional tension.
• Introduce twists or complications that make the story engaging.

Climax

• The protagonist makes a crucial decision or takes an important action.
• The event reaches its peak.

Falling Action

• The effects of the climax begin to unfold.
• Loose ends start to be resolved.
• The protagonist reflects on what happened.

Ending – Conclusion

• The story reaches its final resolution.
• The protagonist may have changed or learned something valuable.
• The ending could be happy, sad, or open-ended, depending on the tone of the story.

Additional Tips

Students should use descriptive language to bring the setting and characters to life. For example, they can use adjectives and adverbs to add more details and color to their story.

Once students have their stories, at the end of this mini-unit, they will have a completed picture e-book that they wrote and created images for. Here’s a breakdown as well as short descriptions of what those 5 days entail: 

• Day 1: Brainstorm
• Day 2: Workshop
• Day 3: Introduction to the AI image creation tool
• Day 4: Creation of the e-book
• Day 5: Presentation

Description of the 5 days

Day 1

On day 1, teachers introduce the mini unit and explain what will be happening for the next 5 days. Then, students are given time to brainstorm and create an outline for their stories. The outline should describe the following: 

• Title of the story
• Background/Setting
• Summary of the 3 Parts (Dog Owner/Grammar Tense)
  • Beginning
  • Middle
  • End
• Summary of the 3 Parts (Dog/Grammar Tense)
  • Beginning
  • Middle
  • End
• Characters

For example, here’s a simplified filled-out version of what the outline could look like:

• Title of the story: Soba’s 10th Birthday Party
• Background/Setting: In a house located in Champaign, Illinois
• Summary of the 3 Parts (Randy/Present Tense)
  • Beginning: Randy decides to throw Soba a big birthday party. Knowing how much Soba enjoys colorful bone cakes, Randy visits the most famous bakery in Champaign, Illinois, hoping to find the best cake for Soba. 
  • Middle: 
    • Rising action: Randy walks into the bakery and starts panicking that there’s no cake for Soba at the bakery
    • Climax: Randy asks the store clerk for a dog cake, and they tell him that they just sold the last one an hour ago
    • Falling action: Randy decides to go to a grocery store to bake a cake himself
  • End: The cake comes out successfully, and Soba is able to celebrate his birthday surrounded by his loved ones
• Summary of the 3 Parts (Soba/Past Tense)
  • Beginning: Soba wakes up suddenly because he hears the door closing early in the morning. Knowing that it is the weekend, he gets curious as to why Randy is leaving so early. 
  • Middle: 
    • Rising action: Soba looks around the house for Randy because he hasn’t been back in a while
    • Climax: Soba notices Randy coming back with bags filled with different types of ingredients, and Soba gets curious
    • Falling action: Soba smells something delicious in the oven and is getting curious about what it could be
  • End: Soba eats the delicious beef jerky-flavored, bone-shaped cake and is happy that everyone he loves came to celebrate him
• Characters: Randy, Soba, bakery clerk, Soba’s friends. 

Day 2

Once the main setting is established, students use their outline from the previous day to write the two narratives. Teachers work as facilitators and monitor students working as they work individually. To maximize the benefits of the next class session, students should complete at least 80% of their two narratives before the following day. 

Day 3

In this lesson, students are introduced to AI image-generation tools and have the opportunity to discuss the potential benefits as well as drawbacks of using those tools. An example of questions you could ask are: 

• What kind of AI image-generation tools do you know about?
• Have you used any AI image-generating tools before? If not, have you used any type of generative AI?
• What are their benefits and drawbacks?
• How can they be utilized to enhance story creation?

The AI image generation tool that we have used is called Fusion Brain, but there are many tools out there that teachers can use, such as ChatGPT. Please note that Fusion Brain does require users to create an account. Since students should not be required to consent to the terms and agreements during the account creation process on platforms like Fusion Brain or ChatGPT, teachers may need to explore alternative AI image creation tools that do not store user data. For example, when CoPilot is accessed using the school’s Microsoft 365 account, it will not store user data to train LLMs. 

The purpose of this lesson is to help students use descriptive language to generate images that illustrate their stories. Students should create at least ten images—five from the owner’s perspective and five from the dog’s—to represent key moments in their narratives. To achieve the desired results, they will need to engage in a process of trial and error, revising and recreating prompts as needed. Throughout this process, the teacher serves as a facilitator, ensuring that students take ownership of their image creation.

After the brief introduction and discussion, the teacher should demonstrate how different prompting can bring different results. Adding more details such as the environment, emotion, or color, can bring drastic differences in images that are generated. For example, in Picture 1 below, the prompt was “A dog waiting to eat cake”, which lacks detail and is very short. In return, Fusion Brain created an image of a somewhat sad looking dog waiting to eat his cake in a dark room. On the other hand, in Picture 2, the prompt given was “A beagle wearing a birthday cone on their head is excited to eat their birthday cake. It’s an outdoor birthday party, so the sky is clear and blue and there are a lot of people gathered around the beagle.” With the added detail, there is a more in-depth description of the scene such as the setting, the dog’s breed, and events occuring. This allowed Fusion Brain to generate a more vivid image with a brighter background and atmosphere that better aligned with the prompt, making it more suitable for representing the scene in the story.

Day 4

During the first 20 minutes of class, teachers can choose to conduct an additional writing workshop if there are students that did not yet finish their stories. For the remainder of the time, the teacher demonstrates the creation of an e-book using a website called Issuu. After the demonstration, students compile their stories and images to create their e-book. Please note that Issuu requires account creation, so teachers should plan accordingly. Alternatively, teachers can adapt this activity by printing out the students’ narratives and images to guide them in creating a physical book instead of an e-book. 

Day 5

Through the carousel presentation method, students have the opportunity to showcase their work to their peers using their computers (or they could use the ones available within their environment, and/or the teacher’s computer, if there is limited access to technological devices) within a structured time frame. Here’s a description of how it works:

• The class is divided into two groups: A and B.
• In the first half of class, Group A presents by reading their stories out loud, while Group B rotates among them, with each student assigned to a random presenter.
• After a set time (determined by the instructor based on class size), Group B moves to the next presenter, allowing Group A to refine their presentation through repetition.
• In the second half of class, the roles reverse: Group B presents, while Group A rotates to engage with different presentations.

Conclusion

In conclusion, incorporating AI-generated images into students’ storytelling has proven to be a powerful approach to enhance creativity, comprehension, and engagement. By guiding learners to create detailed prompts and visualize their narratives, teachers can help them think more deeply about descriptive language and narrative elements. The process of turning ideas into pictures can spark creativity, as students work on coming up with more imaginative details once they see their ideas rendered visually. It can also reinforce comprehension, as the process encourages students to reflect and understand a scene in order to describe it for the AI. Likewise, their peers might find it easier to follow each story when images are provided as context. Most importantly, the combination of text and image could boost engagement and enthusiasm for the project.

By the end of the five day unit, each learner becomes not just an author, but also a creative director by using technology to illustrate their own tales. This experience not only enriches their language skills by practicing different tenses, expanding vocabulary, and improving storytelling techniques, but it also builds digital literacy and confidence. Thus, AI-generated images can enhance storytelling in the language classroom, making it a more interactive experience when used appropriately. 

References

Ahmad, N. W., & Ruslan, S. (2024). Crafting Effective Prompts: A Guideline for Successful Image Generation. IEEE, 84–89. https://doi.org/10.1109/icset63729.2024.10775283 

Chekhratova, O. (2024, April 24). Utilising AI image generators in an English classroom. https://dspace.hnpu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/14999 

Gartner, J., & Romanov, M. (2023). The advantages of AI text to image generation. International Journal of Art, Design, and Metaverse, 1(2). https://topazart.info/e-journals/index.php/ijam/article/view/65/75 

Li, R. (2020). Using artificial intelligence in learning English as a foreign language: An examination of IELTS LIULISHUO as an online platform. Journal of Higher EducationResearch, 1. https://doi.org/10.32629/jher.v1i2.178

Loeckx, J. (2016). Blurring boundaries in education: Context and impact of MOOCs. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 17(3). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i3.2395 

Vigna-Taglianti, J. (2024). AI-generated images as a teaching tool in foreign language acquisition. Technology and Language, 5(3), 85-105. https://doi.org/10.48417/technolang.2024.03.07