Leveraging ChatGPT for English Writing Instruction: Curriculum and Instructional Design Perspectives

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is increasingly being applied in the educational field, particularly in language learning and writing instruction. This paper aims to explore the curriculum and instructional design of ChatGPT on high school students’ English writing motivation and writing abilities. This paper employs a methodology, designing a course for twelfth-grade students from a high school in Taiwan. The goal is to tease the effectiveness out of ChatGPT as a writing assistance tool. The study is conducted over two phases spanning six weeks, including a pre-test, instructional intervention, and a post-test, combined with questionnaires, writing assessments, interviews to comprehensively evaluate changes in students’ writing performance and learning attitudes. During the instructional phase, a series of writing tasks are designed, integrating ChatGPT as a real-time writing assistance tool. Students are encouraged to use ChatGPT throughout the writing process to generate ideas, expand their vocabulary, modify sentence structures, and perform self-corrections. The authors observe the students’ performance after using the AI tool and collect writing samples for analysis.