# Understanding EFL Student Idea Generation Strategies for Creative Writing with NLG Tools

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01484 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01484/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [CoAuthor: Designing a Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset for Exploring Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06796/) (2022)
- [Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09902/) (2017)
- [Do Massively Pretrained Language Models Make Better Storytellers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10705/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Exploring EFL students' prompt engineering in human-AI story writing: an Activity Theory perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01798/) (2023)
- [Cases of EFL Secondary Students' Prompt Engineering Pathways to Complete a Writing Task with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05493/) (2023)
- [Exploring EFL Secondary Students' AI-generated Text Editing While Composition Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17041/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural language generation (NLG) is a process within artificial intelligence where computer systems produce human-comprehensible language texts from information. English as a foreign language (EFL) students' use of NLG tools might facilitate their idea generation, which is fundamental to creative writing. However, little is known about how EFL students interact with NLG tools to generate ideas. This study explores strategies adopted by EFL students when searching for ideas using NLG tools, evaluating ideas generated by NLG tools and selecting NLG tools for ideas generation. Four Hong Kong secondary school students attended workshops where they learned to write stories comprising their own words and words generated by NLG tools. After the workshops, they answered questions to reflect on their writing experience with NLG tools. In a thematic analysis of the written reflections, we found students may have existing ideas when searching for ideas and evaluating ideas with NLG tools. Students showed some aversion to ideas generated by NLG tools and selected NLG tools that generated a greater quantity of ideas. The findings inform our understanding of EFL students' concerns when using NLG tools for idea generation and can inform educators' instruction to implement NLG tools for classroom creative writing.