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

TL;DR

This study analyzes how secondary EFL students develop prompt engineering skills when using ChatGPT for writing tasks, highlighting the importance of education in effective prompt crafting to improve outcomes.

Contribution

It identifies four distinct prompt development pathways, emphasizing the need for prompt engineering education in EFL classrooms to enhance student collaboration with AI.

Findings

Four case pathways illustrate trial-and-error prompt development.

Students benefit from targeted prompt engineering education.

Prompt quality improves with guided instruction.

Abstract

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.