Abstract:

ChatGPT represents the dawn of a new era, leading to the formation of a new ecology of language intelligence that will be profoundly integrated into the foreign language education ecosystem. Currently, the education sector is generally wary of ChatGPT, with many universities around the world banning it for students, considering it a form of 'high-tech plagiarism' and a 'way to avoid learning'.
However, if properly guided and used, ChatGPT's capabilities of text generation, knowledge restructuring, human-computer interaction and learning assistance will facilitate independent learning by foreign language learners and change the role of foreign language teachers, playing an invaluable role in foreign language teaching.
This article briefly reviews the launch and impact of ChatGPT, introduces the current status of ChatGPT use, and clarifies how the role of foreign language teachers in higher education has changed in light of the characteristics of the times and how ChatGPT can be used to optimise foreign language teaching.
The article also shows the attitudes and use of ChatGPT by foreign language learners in Russian and Chinese universities, and gives suggestions on how teachers can guide their students to use ChatGPT appropriately. Finally, the limitations of ChatGPT are combined to reveal the problems that may arise from the integration of foreign language education and ChatGPT.
This article analyses the educational value of ChatGPT on the basis of theoretical research and with reference to a wide range of sources. The data was collected through questionnaires to investigate the attitudes and usage of ChatGPT among foreign language learners in Chinese and Russian colleges and universities.

Keywords:

Foreign language teaching in higher education, generative AI, ChatGPT, assistive teaching.