This study examines the integration of generative AI (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, into students’ academic writing practices, focusing on its use for finding and working with sources. Using the concept of ‘imagined affordances’ we explore how students perceive and interact with this technology in academic contexts. We tested six student-centric prompting strategies across three fields using ChatGPT 3.5 and 4o, simulating realistic academic writing scenarios. Results show significant variations in the accuracy and usability of generated references across fields, strategies, and model versions. Notably, some strategies based on students’ imagined affordances, though technically unsound, produced useful outputs for academic writing tasks. ChatGPT 4o generally outperformed 3.5, highlighting rapid advancements in GenAI’s potential role in academic writing. These findings reveal a growing gap between institutional guidance on GenAI use in academic writing and students’ potential experiences. We advocate for a nuanced approach to AI literacy in higher education that acknowledges students’ perspectives, fosters open dialogue, destigmatizes experimentation while emphasizing critical evaluation, and raises awareness of how imagined affordances shape GenAI interactions during the writing process. This study contributes to discussions on AI integration in academic writing, offering insights for writing instructors, librarians, and policymakers.
Doctoral education often treats academic writing as a solitary, human-centered activity, guided by conventions that emphasize structure, clarity, and discipline. These frameworks rarely consider how other-than-human entities shape the writing process. This article explores how multispecies assemblages inform doctoral writing, proposing that knowledge production can be understood as an eductive process – an unfolding of latent ideas through relationship with the so-called “natural” world. Drawing on examples from my own work, I share an excerpt from a multispecies duoethnographic project that seeks to recognize and incorporate other-than-human perspectives. I reflect on how these encounters have shaped my scholarly voice and academic identity, challenging dominant assumptions about writing as an isolated human endeavor. Reimagining writing as a relational, evolving practice, I offer reflections for integrating multispecies sensibilities into doctoral training and invite educators, researchers, and students to view academic writing as a collaborative process shaped by entanglements of human and more-than-human life.
This paper reports on how undergraduate students evaluated writing outputs created with and without generative artificial intelligence (AI). The paper focuses specifically on two aspects of writing and AI: how prior writing knowledge influenced students’ thinking about AI tools, and how the writing skills to which they were exposed in the writing classroom helped them work with AI-generated materials. This research builds upon Bearman et al.’s (2024) work on evaluative judgement as a pedagogical tool to support learners as they work with AI-mediated texts. The paper uses this lens to identify challenges that learners have in applying writing knowledge to AI-mediated situations and to devise pedagogical means to support student learning in these contexts. We found that, while students could typically evaluate structural components of writing, they struggled to evaluate conceptual ideas both for AI and human generated texts. The findings speak more generally to the need for students to develop their evaluative abilities, as well as ways that AI may reveal and amplify existing challenges that learners have with evaluating the quality of writing, engaging with source materials, and applying genre knowledge to create meaning.
This paper introduces a new approach to support academic writing: the Journal Article Structure Template (JAST). In an ever-more competitive publishing landscape, academics face increasing pressure to produce high-quality papers quickly. The writing process can be time-consuming and being faced with a blank page can prove daunting. While submission guidelines typically outline formal requirements, the more nuanced stylistic and structural expectations of journals can be harder to discern. This is particularly apparent for the growing number of researchers working across disciplines. Shifting publishing trends within journals, evolving editorial orientations and tacit knowledge add further complexity. This article outlines the development of JAST, a set of Open Educational Resources designed to support researchers, particularly those new to academic writing, to identify, explore and understand journal expectations in a more nuanced way beyond author guidelines. The paper provides an overview of the rationale for, and development of, JAST. Guidance is offered on how to use the stepwise template-based approach, along with the tool’s applications to date and feedback from scholars across a range of disciplines. Users consistently report that JAST is effective, time-efficient and flexible, helping them navigate structural conventions, stylistic preferences and content trends.
How – and why – do students engage with an increasingly diverse range of learning opportunities in the digitised university? This paper investigates students’ motivations for choosing in-person, online or asynchronous study modes and explores the implications for academic writing provision. I reflect on student and teacher experiences on a non-credit, Masters-level academic writing course at a UK university which was delivered through a ‘hybrid-flexible’ approach (Beatty, 2019). Students could opt to learn through synchronous in-person (on-campus) classes, synchronous online classes or asynchronous activities delivered through a virtual learning environment; all study modes supported the same learning outcomes and students could switch between them as they choose. Course evaluations reveal students have different motivations for choosing in-person, online or asynchronous learning, and suggest that learning preference and practical motivations are not always aligned. I reflect on the opportunities and challenges I encountered as a teacher designing and delivering hybrid-flexible academic writing content. I conclude by exploring how tensions between learning preference and practical motivations might be addressed in the design and delivery of in-person, online and asynchronous learning activities.
This is a book review of Change and Stability in Thesis and Dissertation Writing: The Evolution of an Academic Genre by Paltridge and Starfield (2024).
This article introduces booksprints as an innovative teaching and learning format for academic writing for undergraduate students. Booksprints foster writing with alternative concepts of authorship and enable students to collaboratively go through an almost authentic digital writing and publishing process in a minimum of time, and at the same time facilitate various future skills, such as written communication, coping with change, and digital literacy. Still being in a ‘prototype’ phase, booksprints are only just being tested as a potential educational format that is a bridge between subject matter and writing/teaching methodology. This article, therefore, presents the basic design of booksprints as well as some specific features, such as moderation of the process by the facilitator, explicit role assignments, visualized project management and the use of digital platforms, in order to introduce them as a writing-intensive learning setting for higher education.
GenAI has demonstrated functionality that seems, uncannily, to parallel reading and writing by identifying/reformulating information from source texts and generating novel content and argumentation. These skills are essential yet challenging for many students tasked with producing literature reviews. This study takes the first steps to investigating the feasibility of a GenAI-facilitated literature review. This investigation starts from the ‘human-in-the-loop’ position that complex processes can be deconstructed and compartmentalized, and that component functions needed for these processes can be delegated to machines while humans contribute to, or control, the overall process. We explore the hypothesis that certain functions of the literature review process, such as information extraction and content classification, might be able to be automated. Prompts modeled on recommended practices for research synthesis were designed to identify and classify particular types of content in research articles. Outputs produced by two GenAI models, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o, were assessed for reliability with a human coder. Overall, the results posit concerns about the models’ performance on this task, cautioning against direct uses of GenAI output as learning scaffolding for students developing literature review skills.
The proliferation of AI tools for text editing and generation has raised challenging but also interesting questions for writing classes. In this paper, we report on our experiences with an exercise exploring the use of AI in an academic writing class. We first outline our conceptualization of the writing process, breaking down the skills that students need to master the complex task of writing, visualized as a ‘writing pie’. This breakdown allows us to critically assess the capabilities of AI tools against our understanding of writing as a human process. We then share our experiences with an exercise with ChatGPT in an academic writing class, where students evaluate a text with respect to its academic style and suggest improvements. Students then compare their own suggestions to those made by ChatGPT and critically evaluate the output. We include both instructors’ and students’ evaluations to reflect on whether the inclusion of such exercises can aid in achieving the course’s learning outcomes. We share three key takeaways: (1) there is value to having students work with AI; (2) critical evaluation of AI output is key; (3) activities with AI should be evaluated against learning goals.
The article presents results from a survey about the academic writing practices among the students of the University of Tartu (Estonia). We analyse how the use of generative artificial intelligence has changed between spring 2023 and spring 2024. Our data shows that there has been a small increase in the percentage of students who have used the help of AI while writing: in 2023, 43.9% of the students reported using or having used AI, in 2024 it was 51.6%. AI is most popular among the students of Science and Technology and least popular among the students of Humanities. In 2023, using AI was more common among undergraduates than master’s students, but by 2024 this situation had reversed. Among the activities that students use AI for, gathering ideas is most popular in both years. The biggest change between the two years is that the number of students using AI for summaries and overviews has nearly tripled. The paper discusses the possible reasons for these tendencies, as well as some relevant implications for learning and teaching (academic) writing.
This study evaluates the effectiveness of corpus-based interventions for enhancing writing skills in English L2 and French L2 among Romanian-speaking students. Following established intervention models, the study involved five stages: initial essay writing, corpus tool training, introduction to target language corpora, essay revision using corpora, and a satisfaction survey. Analysis of linguistic data (e.g., frequency lists, n-grams, and error correction rates) and survey responses from 40 participants reveals improvements in writing accuracy and diversity. Specifically, English L2 students demonstrated enhanced lexical accuracy and varied phraseology, while French L2 students improved syntactic precision and contextual use of academic terms. Both groups showed increased grammatical accuracy, especially in prepositions and articles, through corpus consultation. The findings underscore the pedagogical potential of corpora in writing instruction and the necessity of expanding corpus resources for under-resourced languages like French.
This symposium is an extension of a plenary forum on generative AI (hereafter GenAI) held at the EATAW Conference at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland, in June 2023. Since the conference, AI – particularly the large language models (LLMs) shaping GenAI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – continue to develop rapidly with extensive integration and usage across disciplines and career sectors with educational and societal impacts. Given these developments, we recognize the central role that writing instruction has in fostering critical literacies and engaged usage and, at times, non-usage of GenAI. Just as we have adapted our teaching and learning to other technological developments, so too are we now at a time of transition and adaptation. Our initial discussion at EATAW was wide-ranging, intentionally so because (1) there is so much to explore in relation to GenAI, and (2) the EATAW membership is diverse, coming from a range of academic backgrounds. Thus in our original plenary and here in this symposium we have raised issues ranging from specific pedagogical approaches to questions of program and institutional administration, to broader public issues and conversations about the relationship of humans to machines. Here in this written symposium we each raise a different issue related to GenAI and writing with the aim to foster dialogue and discussion about GenAI in writing-related contexts.
Academic writing has always posed a challenge to university students, regardless of the language they are writing in (first, second or foreign language) or the amount of digital support they have access to – for example, online dictionaries, thesauruses, or new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) software such as ChatGPT. With the rise of GenAI as a legitimate digital tool in higher education, it is crucial to identify the professional development needs of teaching faculty in order to ensure quality teaching. Based on factors such as digital literacy, or access to digital tools, these needs might differ in various geographical regions. Within the context of the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu), this paper aims to provide a differentiated, international student perspective on the use of GenAI in the academic writing process, identifying professional development needs for faculty. We developed an online questionnaire that was filled out by 192 university students from 15 different countries. In addition to their academic and linguistic backgrounds, the respondents answered questions about their own experiences and competences with the use of GenAI within academic research. Results highlight clear discrepancies between geographic regions, for example, in their self-ranked digital proficiency or in what GenAI tools they use. This, along with further results from the analysis, provides the basis to identify some professional development needs.
Addressing issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in academic writing is vital in higher education, especially when considering the lived experiences and education of undergraduates from diverse backgrounds. This paper acknowledges the challenges faced by students unfamiliar with Western academic integrity standards, emphasising the disparities experienced by socioeconomically disadvantaged, racialised, and international students. The paper describes an innovative learner-agentic empowerment approach at a Canadian university designed to enable students from diverse backgrounds to gain the academic, cultural, disciplinary and linguistic capital required to practise academic integrity. Through a mixed-method analysis of 182 undergraduates in a writing support program, we found that students who responded to a reflective prompt on academic integrity at the start of the program wrote substantially more (mean 7050 words) than those who did not respond to the prompt (mean 1692 words) during the month-long program. Qualitative analyses revealed students' unfamiliarity with cultural differences, academic integrity practices, linguistic challenges, and penalty severity. This model suggests the importance of a proactive, learner-agentic approach to facilitate education about academic integrity and to address equity and inclusivity. The study underscores the importance of systemic pedagogical changes, furthering the dialogue on equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education.
This article examines how four students in high school or college choose to integrate sources in their assignments using quotation and paraphrases. Implementing an innovative methodology, a digital screen capture software was used to record all the participants’ actions as they wrote a 500-word argumentative essay. A video of each participant’s actions was produced. These actions translated as quantitative results and showed the frequency of various actions grouped within five categories of strategies linked to various skills (informational skills, writing skills, referencing skills, basic computer skills and task compliance skills) and a sixth category linked to plagiarism actions. The four texts were also analysed for their quality and their level of plagiarism. Results show that the college students performed better on overall text quality, but their texts contained more plagiarism. When looking at the strategies used, all students spent more time on their informational and writing strategies than on their referencing strategies. When using sources, in general, participants had more difficulties with paraphrasing than with quoting, often not referencing their paraphrases, which resulted in plagiarism. Patterns emerged for the data showing four types of actions when integrating sources in assignments: the casual integrator, the aspiring integrator, the fearless integrator and the ethical integrator. For each profile, recommendations on how to better develop students’ paraphrasing, quoting, and referencing skills are provided.
Academic integrity continues to concern educators worldwide. Furthermore, general guidelines for ensuring academic integrity do not seem to encompass all the angles that are required to be taken into consideration when exploring the factors that contribute to multicultural students’ decision to adhere to the norms and values of academic integrity. This literature review focuses on how academic values can be unified through academic integrity, and specifically explores factors and perspectives of utilising academic integrity to unify academic values when teaching academic writing. The dimensions of academic values explored in this paper are: a) beliefs and attitudes of multicultural undergraduate students and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), b) the value of academic performance in academic writing classes, c) exploring the development of multicultural students’ authorial voice while maintaining academic integrity, and d) using technology to encourage academic integrity in academic writing classes. Over 56 identified sources were chosen carefully to ensure unbiased approaches to the issues of academic integrity and development of academic writing skills. The authors explored the issues from a variety of perspectives. The gap noticed in the review of literature is the disconnection between academic values and academic integrity. The authors make recommendations for future research.
