Empowering Student Writers in the AI Era : A Prompt-Based Teaching Model for Academic Writing

The purpose of this study is to determine the need for guidance on using generative AI for academic writing, propose an appropriate teaching model in response, and assess its effectiveness. To identify the need for guidance, a comparative analysis was conducted between the essays of AI users and non-users with regard to the use of cohesive devices without any intervention. Based on the identified need, a prompt-based teaching model was developed to support students in using generative AI more effectively. This model emphasizes four key dimensions of prompt literacy: task specificity, context, constraints and style. These dimensions were designed to help students generate AI-assisted drafts that are better aligned with academic writing conventions. To evaluate the model’s effectiveness, a within-group comparison was conducted before and after its implementation. The results demonstrated that, without proper guidance, students struggle to capitalize on AI’s full potential and the prompt-based teaching model could contribute to improving writing by encouraging students to compose more semantically connected sentences and paragraphs and by increasing their use of logical, additive, negative, and overall connectives.