EXPLORING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS A LITERACY PRACTICE: GRADUATE STUDENTS’ NAVIGATION OF AI AND ACADEMIC WRITING

Abstract

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) writing technologies, including writing evaluation, feedback, translation, and text generation tools, have revolutionized existing literacy practices in higher education. Although numerous studies have been conducted to investigate AI in academic writing, they are mostly underpinned by a skills-based literacy approach or view AI as a threat to the student work’s authenticity, disregarding the potential role of writing with AI as a literacy event that shapes students’ literacy practices. Therefore, this qualitative case study aims to explore how AI-based writing assistants can shape the literacy practices of graduate students at one university with an English medium of instruction in Kazakhstan and the implications of this for their academic writing. Data were gathered from eight participants through focus groups, qualitative questionnaires, and arts-based research instruments, namely ‘significant circles’ and image cards. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. Drawing on the literacy as a social practice approach (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Hamilton, 2010; Street, 1984) and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL, 2016), the study found that students’ positive perspectives were related to AI’s help with language mechanics (skill-based literacies) and providing access to scholarly discourses (academic socialization). Moreover, AI fostered ethical scholarship and shaped scholarly identities as students faced challenges of AI, including unreliability, overcorrection, and overreliance. Participants used AI because it offered them a space to navigate social and institutional literacy practices to be ethical scholars, write scholarly, and foster their scholarly identities and voices. Finally, graduate students’ use of AI in academic writing could best be understood as a set of institutional social practices where AI allowed them to mediate scholarly expectations and develop writer identities valued by tertiary institutions. The results of this research will enhance teachers’ and policymakers’ comprehension of how students utilize AI in academic writing and offer implications for teaching writing at universities. Keywords: artificial intelligence, academic writing in English, literacy as a social practice.