Enhancing students’ L2 writing by integrating artificial intelligence with corpus-based language pedagogy

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent, a range of benefits for student use has been recognised, such as providing instant feedback to support writing development. However, concerns persist about students’ appropriate use of AI in academic writing. Corpora, offering an edge over AI in addressing some of these concerns in language classrooms, have proven effective in enhancing students’ writing, particularly by improving the use of lexico-grammatical patterns, which highlights the importance of corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP). This study, therefore, aims to explore the potential of integrating AI with CBLP in L2 students’ writing. The participants were 50 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners majoring in English at an English-Medium Instruction (EMI) university in China. They received corpus and AI training and then used their preferred corpus and AI tools in writing revision. During the revision, learners noted down the changes and the tools they referred to. After the revision, questionnaires were administered to examine learners’ attitudes towards using the two types of tools and the combination of AI and corpora in writing revision, followed by semi-structured interviews to gain deeper insights. Learners’ drafts and revisions were also collected for analysis to explore the changes made by AI and corpus tools. The results showed that learners successfully made a variety of changes in their revised drafts using corpus and AI tools and demonstrated their preferences in actual use: Corpus tools were more significantly used to refine collocations, while AI was more frequently employed for revising sentences. In general, learners held positive attitudes towards the two technologies and their integration in revision. For example, corpus tools were perceived as beneficial in enhancing collocational competence, while AI was considered valuable in generating immediate responses and refining sentences. The study contributes to our understanding of the potential for integrating AI and CBLP in students’ L2 writing.