Student writing - ELT Experiences

With previous semesters, I had some challenges with students clearly submitting AI-generated work. At first, I wanted to put a stop to this by incorporating weekly in-class handwritten assignments, but I soon discovered that it would take a large amount of time to provide suitable feedback on time. This semester, I decided to embrace AI and to develop my Writing and Presentation Skills course by incorporating the digitalisation of their writing by getting students to write blogs. This is despite the overreliance of AI, particularly with auto-generated content and the loss of student voice with their writing.

In this blog post, I will share some personal experiences of incorporating blogging with my students, best practices if you wish to do the same, as well as some final pointers should anyone be interested. As ever, if you have any advice for student blogging, then do please let me know and drop a comment – even if you enjoyed reading my ramblings today.

One of the courses that I teach in South Korea is a writing course to international students. Essentially, it is with this course students learn the fundamentals of planning, structuring, and writing an essay so they acquire the necessary skills to complete any future essay in their other courses. However, after delivering a course a few years ago, students were offered unfettered access to AI tools such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, and I noticed an increase detection of AI usage with Turnitin. This obviously posed a range of challenges for educators and professors, regardless their specialism, to assess

After a few years of attempting to curtail student AI reliance or misuse, I am no where closer to where I was a few years ago, let alone establish any clear and detailed criteria to grade student written work, but I have experimented with and without the inclusion of AI. I am sharing what I have been able to establish over the past few years in relation to student writing and AI and I hope this helps anyone else that is in the same position.

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