MYUNGHWAN HWANG (COGNITIVE SCIENCE INSTITUTE)
HEE KYUNG LEE (Yonsei University)

INTERACTING WITH CHATGPT: IMPACT ON STUDENT REVISIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS : DIGITAL LITERACIES/LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TECHNOLOGY

This study aimed to explore how using ChatGPT impacts students' English writing skills and to understand their interactions with ChatGPT, specifically focusing on the revision phase. For this purpose, four specific research questions were proposed: 1) Does using ChatGPT improve the quality of students' English writing? 2) What are students' objectives for utilizing ChatGPT during writing revisions? 3) What types of requests do students submit to meet their objectives with ChatGPT? 4) How do students' objectives for using ChatGPT relate to their actual requests? To gather data, a one-group pretest-posttest experiment was designed at a university in South Korea, involving 11 EFL university students. During the experiment, various kinds of data were collected, including the students' essays, reflection logs, and the records of students’ ChatGPT use. The collected data was analyzed through various methods: the nonparametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test, content analysis, and network analysis. The study's outcomes are as follows: Firstly, the study found that ChatGPT's incorporation boosts spelling and grammatical precision in writing. Secondly, it identified fifteen unique objectives for utilizing chatbots, with the goals of "Improving Grammar Accuracy," "Generating Ideas," and "Finding Words" being the most commonly cited. Thirdly, it also elicited ten distinct requests to the chatbot, with "Rewriting Essay" and "Requesting Ideas" as the leading requests. Lastly, it observed a noticeable trend where users' prompts did not accurately reflect students' intended objectives with the chatbot, indicating either a misalignment or a deficiency in details. This study suggests further pedagogical implications.

Myunghwan Hwang, a scholar at Yonsei University, South Korea, delves into enhancing English writing skills, leveraging AI for language education, and understanding learner traits, aiming to bridge the gap between technology and language education.

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