Examining EFL Students' Motivation Level in Using QuillBot to Improve Paraphrasing Skills

Abstract

Paraphrasing, being an essential component of academic writing skills, poses a challenge for EFL students. It requires motivation through integration of technology and artificial intelligence-mediated tool like QuillBot to address the issue. QuillBot, the online artificial intelligence tool, has the potential to assist and motivate students to improve their paraphrasing skills. This study, to address the scarcity of the available literature especially in Najran University context, aims to examine EFL students' motivation using QuillBot to improve their paraphrasing skills. To achieve the study objectives, the descriptive-diagnostic research design was followed. One hundred two students registered in Technical Writing course were the participants to respond to a questionnaire and semi-structured interview questions. The study explores whether there is any significant difference in the participants’ responses in terms of their gender. The results revealed that QuillBot highly motivated students to improve their paraphrasing skills from their point of view. Also, it was shown that gender influenced the respondents' answers in favor of females. Additionally, the content analysis showed that technology-mediated classrooms, personal digital gadgets, easy access to software and internet applications, proper guidance (how to use the AI tool to solve the paraphrasing exercises of the syllabus) to use AI etc. are factors that highly motivate EFL students to utilize QuillBot in improving their paraphrasing skills. The potential implications of these resources are to make writing classes more enjoyable, engaging, interactive, productive, and lively for students. Based on the findings, the study suggests EFL teachers use QuillBot to enhance paraphrasing skills, inspire students, adapt teaching methods to technology, while future research is recommended to explore essay and summary writing.