THE ROLE OF CHATGPT IN DEVELOPING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' ACADEMIC WRITING SKILLS

The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly transformed educational paradigms globally, particularly in foreign language acquisition. This research paper investigates the role of ChatGPT, a prominent generative AI tool, in enhancing the academic writing skills of university students enrolled in English language programs. Academic writing represents one of the most complex tasks for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, requiring a high level of syntactic accuracy, lexical diversity, cohesion, and adherence to formal registers. Through a mixed-methods research design combining surveys from 150 undergraduate students and structured interviews with 5 university educators, this study evaluates the specific areas where ChatGPT serves as an effective pedagogical aid, including brainstorming, outline generation, grammar correction, and vocabulary enrichment. Concurrently, the paper addresses potential pedagogical constraints, such as structural over-reliance, plagiarism risks, and the dilution of authentic student voice. The findings suggest that while ChatGPT offers substantial scaffolded support for drafting and revising, its deployment must be accompanied by explicit AI literacy frameworks to prevent a decline in critical thinking and analytical writing capabilities.