The Potential Use of Artificial Intelligence in ESL Writing Assessment: A Case Study of IELTS Writing Tasks

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential use of generative AI in ESL Writing Assessment, particularly in IELTS Writing Tasks. The first part introduces the author’s relationship with generative AI in the educational setting, and why the author chooses this topic. This section also contains information about generative AI like ChatGPT, and the prompts employed to generate the article. The second part is the article created by ChatGPT, which compares the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI in assessing students’ essays. The third part is a critical reflection of how generative AI performs in creating such an academic paper. It can indeed help researchers to write an informative article more efficiently. But it is noticeable that some specific and important information could be missing and the references are likely to be false ones. Educators should be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI tools to make the most of it.