Using AI Assistance Tools in Academic Writing: Voices from EFL Postgraduates Students

Abstract

For many EFL postgraduates, academic writing is a challenging task. The emergence of AI writing tools provides support for them. AI-tools can not only provide immediate feedback on grammar, vocabulary and sentence summarization, but also help students better understand the norms and styles of English academic writing. Therefore, the current study adopted a mixed research approach to deeply explore the usage, benefits, practical difficulties and latent risks of AI-tools in academic writing among Chinese EFL postgraduates joining a Malaysian university. To achieve this aim, 108 postgraduates were surveyed and 8 students were interviewed. The results revealed that in general, students rely heavily on AI-tools, especially comprehensive writing assistance systems like ChatGPT and Grammarly during the writing stages such as language refinement, and logical adjustment. In addition, the respondents highly praised the positive role of AI tools in enhancing writing efficiency, grammatical accuracy and lexical diversity, especially in the early planning stage of writing. However, the findings also revealed a variety of challenges that students in using AI tools in academic writing, such as the disconnection between AI content and writing intentions, doubts about the accuracy of information, and anxiety over the deterioration of writing skills and the loss of academic voices. Insufficient educational support and guidance gaps also restrict the reasonable integration of AI tools in academic writing to a certain extent. Based on the findings, useful suggestions on how to enhance AI literacy, specify AI usage norms and develop a human-machine collaboration model are offered in this study.