Finding Your Voice: Using Generative AI to Help International Students Improve Their Writing

Students are faced with a wide range of writing tasks during their studies, including writing literature reviews, summarising papers and producing reflective reports. Writing tasks present a challenge for students who are not writing in their native language due to studying overseas. Indeed, students writing in their native language have a distinct advantage in assignments involving writing. The rapid emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) over the past three years has the potential to significantly impact the quality and efficiency of writing of non-native English speakers by providing international students with an opportunity to minimise the language barrier when writing in academia. This paper reports on a series of structured exercises we developed to determine how using Gen-AI tools built on large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude might improve student writing in the context of computing degrees. Two of the exercises were successfully repeated with a second and independent group of students. We analyse some issues to be aware of when using Gen-AI tools and make suggestions as to their effective use. The key underlying message is that students need to develop their own distinct voice.