# Cases of EFL Secondary Students' Prompt Engineering Pathways to Complete a Writing Task with ChatGPT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05493 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05493/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11382/) (2023)
- [Prompt Programming for Large Language Models: Beyond the Few-Shot Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07350/) (2021)
- [Learning from Few Examples: A Summary of Approaches to Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04291/) (2022)
- [How to Prompt? Opportunities and Challenges of Zero- and Few-Shot Learning for Human-AI Interaction in Creative Applications of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01390/) (2022)
- [Prompting AI Art: An Investigation into the Creative Skill of Prompt Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13534/) (2023)
- [A Literature Survey of Recent Advances in Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06657/) (2022)
- [One-shot and few-shot learning of word embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10280/) (2017)
- [Understanding EFL Student Idea Generation Strategies for Creative Writing with NLG Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01484/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Learning to Prompt in the Classroom to Understand AI Limits: A pilot study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01540/) (2023)
- [Exploring how EFL students talk to and through AI to develop texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12523/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art (SOTA) chatbot. Although it has potential to support English as a foreign language (EFL) students' writing, to effectively collaborate with it, a student must learn to engineer prompts, that is, the skill of crafting appropriate instructions so that ChatGPT produces desired outputs. However, writing an appropriate prompt for ChatGPT is not straightforward for non-technical users who suffer a trial-and-error process. This paper examines the content of EFL students' ChatGPT prompts when completing a writing task and explores patterns in the quality and quantity of the prompts. The data come from iPad screen recordings of secondary school EFL students who used ChatGPT and other SOTA chatbots for the first time to complete the same writing task. The paper presents a case study of four distinct pathways that illustrate the trial-and-error process and show different combinations of prompt content and quantity. The cases contribute evidence for the need to provide prompt engineering education in the context of the EFL writing classroom, if students are to move beyond an individual trial-and-error process, learning a greater variety of prompt content and more sophisticated prompts to support their writing.