Speaker
Description
In English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) writing curricula, teaching is usually ordered from sentence construction to paragraph development so that students can get the fundamentals of language. However, curricular discontinuity may impede this progression and undermine student writing performance.
HUFLIT University's first-year students have to study paragraph-writing without ever receiving formal sentence-writing instruction, and are often guilty of making grammatical mistakes or errors in sentences when writing paragraphs. The current study seeks to examine the chatbot-based instruction effect on students’ sentence-level accuracy in paragraph making.
The research design was quasi-experimental with a pre-test–post-test and it was conducted with 80 first-year EFL students from the Writing 2 course. The chatbot was embedded in instruction as a source of sentence-level support and feedback. Pre-test and post-tests were given to judge the enhancement in the students. Furthermore, a questionnaire was employed to investigate the usefulness of and benefits from engaging with the chatbot by students.
Results show that students have significantly better sentence-writing and grammatical abilities after paragraph writing with the help of chatbot intervention. The questionnaire data also show overall positive student acceptance of the chatbot as a writing support tool.
The study indicates that chatbot-assisted instruction can be used as an effective pedagogical resource to meet foundational problems concerning writing, due to curriculum gaps. The results suggest pedagogical implications for EFL teachers and curriculum developers who want to include AI-mediated support to scaffold sentence-level writing skills in higher education settings.
Keywords: AI Chatbot, gap in EFL writing instruction, sentence construction, HUFLIT
