The impact of using ChatGPT as an extramural tool on university students' academic writing achievement

Artificial intelligence-based language models have become increasingly used tools in foreign language teaching and have transformed teaching processes. In this context, ChatGPT, one of the most widely used models, creates remarkable opportunities by offering various supports to students in developing academic writing skills. This study, which has a quasi-experimental design, aimed to examine the effect of ChatGPT on the writing skills of students studying in an English Language Teaching program at a higher education institution in Türkiye. In the study, 44 students enrolled in the ELT program were selected by convenience sampling and divided into experimental and control groups. Before the intervention, both groups were given writing assignments within the scope of the curriculum and the writings obtained were evaluated as pre-test data. The experimental group was given one-hour training on how to use ChatGPT effectively and consciously in academic writing lessons and had a short practice. For the next seven weeks, students were encouraged to use ChatGPT effectively. The control group did not receive any intervention. At the end of the process, writing samples were collected again from both groups and post-test data were obtained. The evaluations made by three independent evaluators were analyzed with SPSS. According to the results of the analysis, the subcomponents of main idea, content, organization, style and grammatical accuracy were examined; a statistically significant improvement was found only in the "main idea" dimension. Small and moderate improvements were observed in the other components. This suggests that ChatGPT can be an effective supporting tool in academic writing courses in the long run.