Method of teaching students’ foreign language creative writing based on evaluative feedback from artificial intelligence

Abstract

Introduction. The development of students' foreign language creative writing skills is a component of the goal of foreign language teaching in higher education. The effectiveness of the development of students' writing skills is largely determined by the method and tools of teaching. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are able to provide learners with evaluative feedback that can be used to finalize written creative works in a foreign language. The aim of the paper is to develop a method of teaching students to write foreign language creative works on the basis of evaluative feedback from artificial intelligence, to test its effectiveness in the course of experimental training. Materials and methods. The study involved 1st year students (N=50) of Derzhavin Tambov State University (Russian Federation), majoring in English as a Foreign Language. In order to test the effectiveness of the authors’ method, stages of training were developed during which students received evaluative feedback from the AI tool in order to further refine their papers. Students of the control group developed writing skills using the traditional method. The objects of control were: a) content of the paper; b) organization and structure; c) support of ideas and arguments; d) vocabulary; e) grammar. The data analysis was carried out using the Student’s t-test. Research results. It was found that the method of teaching students foreign language creative writing on the basis of evaluative feedback from artificial intelligence is more effective in comparison with the traditional method in terms of the following criteria: a) content of creative paper (t=2,75; p≤0,05), b) organization and structure (t=3,05; p ≤ 0,05), and c) argumentation (t=2,44; p ≤ 0,05). At the same time, statistics did not reveal any growth in the development of students' lexical (t=2,13; p>0,05) and grammar (t=2,13; p>0,05) skills, which is explained by the individual nature of AI recommendations and the objectively lack of sustainability in the lexical component of the teaching content when studying different topics within the framework of one academic course. Conclusion. The novelty of the study includes the development of stages of teaching students foreign language creative writing based on evaluative feedback from artificial intelligence. The results obtained can be used in the development of methods of teaching foreign languages with the use of AI-technologies.