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Does practising with ChatGPT improve EFL students' writing?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Students who practised academic writing with ChatGPT feedback scored clearly higher on a later writing test and reported more writing motivation than students taught with teacher feedback alone.
Study at a glance
- Design
- RCT — Students randomly assigned to 12 weeks of ChatGPT-assisted writing practice or conventional teacher-feedback instruction; pre/post IELTS writing tasks and motivation scale, plus interviews.
- N
- N=50 · 50 Chinese EFL undergraduates split between experimental and control groups (per-group sizes not stated); nine experimental students interviewed.
- Population
- Intermediate to upper-intermediate EFL undergraduates at one Chinese national university
- Outcome
- IELTS-rubric academic writing scores (overall, content, organisation, language use) and a seven-item writing motivation scale
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Key findings
After adjusting for pre-test scores, the ChatGPT group had higher overall writing scores (post-test means 59.12 versus 45.18, Cohen's d of 0.76) and higher scores on content, organisation and language use. Writing motivation also rose more in the ChatGPT group (d = 0.52). Interviewees described the tool as a personal tutor but worried about over-reliance, suggestions that did not fit their style, and whether gains would last without it.
Methodology
Fifty Chinese undergraduates learning English were randomly split into two groups taught by the same teacher with the same materials for 12 weeks. One group wrote with ChatGPT giving real-time feedback on grammar, vocabulary and organisation; the other got conventional in-class teacher feedback. Both groups wrote IELTS academic tasks before and after, scored by two raters, and filled in a writing-motivation questionnaire; nine ChatGPT users were also interviewed.
Limitations
The sample was small and from one university, and group sizes are not reported. One of the two raters was the second author, who also taught the course, so scoring was not blind and expectations could have leaked into grades. The groups differed in more than ChatGPT (e.g. anytime access and a web platform versus in-class-only feedback), and the authors acknowledge possible contamination between groups. There was no delayed follow-up, so it cannot show whether students write better once the tool is removed.
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