Cases of EFL Secondary Students' Prompt Engineering Pathways to Complete a Writing Task with ChatGPT

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Woo, David James, Guo, Kai, Susanto, Hengky
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Woo, David James
Guo, Kai
Susanto, Hengky
author_facet Woo, David James
Guo, Kai
Susanto, Hengky
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_05493
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cases of EFL Secondary Students' Prompt Engineering Pathways to Complete a Writing Task with ChatGPT
Woo, David James
Guo, Kai
Susanto, Hengky
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
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.
title Cases of EFL Secondary Students' Prompt Engineering Pathways to Complete a Writing Task with ChatGPT
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05493