Research team

ESL writing in a changing landscape: Examining the impact of GenAI assistance and task type on L2 writing quality. 01/12/2025 - 30/11/2029

Abstract

The main goal of this project is to investigate how writing environment (unaided vs. GenAI-assisted ) and task type (formal persuasive essay vs. informal diary entry) affect L2 English writing quality, operationalised as four core dimensions: functional adequacy (i.e. communicative task fulfilment) (Kuiken & Vedder, 2017), accuracy, syntactic complexity, and lexical diversity (CAFA for short). Theoretically, the study will contribute to a reconceptualisation of L2 writing quality which is no longer a purely cognitive-linguistic activity performed by individual learners, but rather the result of human-machine interactions. Empirically, the study will showcase how learner corpus tools and methods can be used to quantitively and qualitatively capture changes in L2 writing quality as a function of both writing environment and task type.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Funding

  • BOF

Project type(s)

  • Research Project