Most vocational students at Politeknik Negeri Lhokseumawe achieve satisfactory grades in English. However, upon further investigation, they encounter challenges in writing. This phenomenon is evident in several personal statements when writing scholarship applications or assignments, although they had utilised the AI tools to support their writing. The research problem of this study is to determine the nature of AI-generated tools in enhancing writing among vocational students, with special emphasis on high-stakes application writing, e.g. applications to scholarships and internship essays. Although vocational students have a record of satisfactory performance in standardised evaluations of English, they experience considerable difficulty in producing coherent, convincing, and professionally relevant written reports required for international opportunities. This study employed an experimental research design, involving 27 students in the control group and 25 in the experimental group. The task was to investigate the effectiveness of AI-generated writing assistants such as Grammarly, SciSpace, and Jenni to bridge the gap between theoretical language knowledge and practical writing skills. Writing quality was evaluated using the Brown (2007) assessment of writing, focusing on grammar and mechanics, limited vocabulary, structural composition, genre consciousness, and rhetorical effectiveness in the work environment. The systematic analysis of the research compares the effects of AI tools on students’ skills to write error-free, context-related, and persuasive application documents. The findings have implications for the use of AI-assisted writing to prepare vocational students for global opportunities through improved application and professional writing competency.
The number of lexical resources is crucial in English and essential for learners because it is a foundation of one’s English capability. This research aimed to determine whether the use of the Wayground application (formerly known as Quizizz) enhances vocabulary mastery among first-grade students at one of the senior high schools in Banda Aceh. The method used quantitative research with a pre-experimental design. In this study, the researchers used one class of students as an experimental class and took 30 students from the class as the sample. The data were collected by using pre-test and post-test. SPSS 26 was used to analyse the data statistically. The result of this research revealed a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores. The mean score of the pre-test was 67.17, and the mean score of the post-test was 83.90. The students’ scores on the post-test were higher than on the pre-test, so there was an improvement in students’ vocabulary mastery between before and after treatment using the Wayground application. It indicated that the Ho hypothesis was rejected, and the Ha theory was accepted. This result showed that the Wayground application can potentially improve the students’ vocabulary mastery. Therefore, the use of the Wayground application proved to be an effective learning aid in enhancing students’ vocabulary outcomes.
Speaking activities in the classroom follow standards in their implementation to provide real results for students, including exercises or practices based on real-world communication, having students start speaking in public to build their confidence, and providing technology-based learning that allows them to do self-learning with more accurate exercises and feedback. This study analyzed factors that might hinder students’ confidence in speaking, using qualitative research methods. This study used a qualitative method, distributing an open-ended questionnaire. The participants were 30 students from one of the private universities in Semarang, comprising 12 males and 18 females. The data were analyzed thematically to identify students’ challenges, strategies, and responses. The research results show that students respond positively to speaking activities using technology, particularly when tools personalize practice, provide repeated exposure, and offer non-judgmental feedback, which helps reduce anxiety. However, the data also indicate several inhibiting factors, including fear of making mistakes, limited vocabulary, lack of speaking exposure in daily life, and performance anxiety when speaking in front of peers. To sum up, this study contributes to the development of practical speaking activities by proposing classroom strategies that combine real-world communication tasks, confidence-building exercises, and technology-enhanced learning. Therefore, this research provides several speaking-learning activities that can be applied in the classroom to build students’ confidence in real-world English communication.
