INVESTIGATING THE IMPACT OF AI WRITING-ASSISTANCE TOOLS ON THE SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY OF ENGLISH ACADEMIC WRITING AMONG NON-NATIVE GRADUATE STUDENTS

Graduate students have access to many tools that can assist them with writing using artificial intelligence. It is unclear whether they have an impact on the linguistic quality of academic writing. This study examines the effect of these tools on the syntactic complexity of English academic writing of non-native graduate students in Pakistan. The study design used was a quasi-experimental mixed methods design. The number of students selected for the study was 60 MPhil and PhD students who were selected by purposive sampling and divided into two groups (experimental and control) of 30 each. The experimental group was exposed to AI tools for eight weeks in academic writing tasks. The experimental group was exposed to AI tools for 8 weeks in academic writing tasks. The control group wrote independently. Participants were administered a pre-test and a post-test essay without the use of any tools. The L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer was used to analyze essays. They used SPSS for t-tests, and thematically analyzed their interviews with twelve experimental participants. There were no differences between the groups at pre-test. The experimental group at the post-test had significantly longer sentences, more clauses per T-unit and more complex nominal. The number of dependent clauses in each clause did not significantly vary. There was no significant change in the control group. The participants felt good about the structural ideas given and became more confident in the interviews. They were worried about being too dependent. The results indicate that guided use of AI can be beneficial for syntactic development in L2 academic writing. It provides implications for graduate pedagogy in Pakistan.