Speaker
Description
The past few years have witnessed the rapid emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools which have significantly reshaped the academic writing processes in higher education. There has been an increasing tendency among the undergraduates to utilise AI-powered platforms to support multiple stages of academic writing, including brainstorming, initial drafting and revision processes. This study is aimed to explore how university students describe their experiences of employing AI-driven tools in their academic writing works and their attitudes towards AI’s position in reconstructing their writing practices. Adopting a qualitative research design, this study relied on semi-structured interviews conducted with English-majored undergraduates at HUFLIT who frequently integrate AI tools in their academic writing tasks. The collected data underwent thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns that reflect their experiences and interpretation for their engagement with AI in writing skills. The findings reveal that the participants perceived AI as a form of cognitive scaffolding which supported idea generation, language refinement and structural organisation throughout their academic writing tasks. Concurrently, the students expressed concerns about the over-reliance on AI tools, the difficulties in identifying authorship and the academic integrity. Lastly, the results suggest that students had mixed views of AI’s impacts on their future writing development while attempting to balance between efficiency brought by AI and their true skill development. This study expects to contribute profound understanding of responsible AI integration and relevant pedagogical approaches to academic writing skills in the era of generative AI.
Keywords: generative AI, academic writing, EFL, university students, qualitative study
