Cases of EFL Secondary Students' Prompt Engineering Pathways to Complete a Writing Task with ChatGPT
It addresses the challenge of non-technical EFL students struggling to craft effective prompts for AI writing support, though it is incremental as it builds on existing research about prompt engineering in education.
This paper analyzed how secondary school EFL students used ChatGPT for a writing task, identifying four distinct prompt engineering pathways that illustrate a trial-and-error process, with findings suggesting the need for structured education to improve prompt quality and variety.
ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art (SOTA) chatbot. Although it has potential to support English as a foreign language (EFL) students' writing, to effectively collaborate with it, a student must learn to engineer prompts, that is, the skill of crafting appropriate instructions so that ChatGPT produces desired outputs. However, writing an appropriate prompt for ChatGPT is not straightforward for non-technical users who suffer a trial-and-error process. This paper examines the content of EFL students' ChatGPT prompts when completing a writing task and explores patterns in the quality and quantity of the prompts. The data come from iPad screen recordings of secondary school EFL students who used ChatGPT and other SOTA chatbots for the first time to complete the same writing task. The paper presents a case study of four distinct pathways that illustrate the trial-and-error process and show different combinations of prompt content and quantity. The cases contribute evidence for the need to provide prompt engineering education in the context of the EFL writing classroom, if students are to move beyond an individual trial-and-error process, learning a greater variety of prompt content and more sophisticated prompts to support their writing.