A process-genre approach with GenAI feedback: students’ ideational meaning development

Abstract

This study examined Indonesian EFL undergraduate students’ development and retention of ideational meaning before, during, and after learning the analytical exposition genre in a GenAI feedback-supported process-genre approach. This approach emphasizes the importance of explicit teaching, scaffolding, and feedback provision. Due to its infancy, the impact of this pedagogy, especially with GenAI feedback support, has been understudied. To fill this gap, this quasi-experimental study analyzed students’ diagnostic writing test, four drafts (rough to edited), and final writing test produced by 15 students who undertook the course. Each draft was scored by an automated essay scoring (AES) tool informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL), focusing on ideational lexicogrammatical features. As the assumption of normality was violated, a Friedman test was conducted. The analysis indicated a statistically significant difference in ideational meaning across writing stages (X2=33.280, Df=5, p<.001), with substantial improvement observed during the instruction. Although a slight drop was identified in the final writing test, suggesting that their development was not fully retained when they turned to writing beyond the instruction, their performance remained higher than in early drafts. This finding highlights the value of support provided by the process-genre approach with GenAI feedback in developing students’ ideational meaning.