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Abstract
This innovation reports on the design, implementation and evaluation of an AI-powered learner corpora to support English writing in a Malaysian national primary school. The intervention targeted Year 4 to Year 6 pupils learning English as a second language within the CEFR-aligned KSSR Semakan curriculum, in which a significant portion struggled with vocabulary, cohesion and sentence boundaries writing around A1 to A2 level. This work is in response to two competing tensions: i) pupils’ increasing use of generative AI, which produces fast but less human-involved and locally-grounded language, and ii) the underutilisation of corpus linguistics in primary classrooms due to technical and training demands. A 152,187 word corpus of 560 anonymised pupil essays was compiled and uploaded into a retrieval-augmented custom GPT. This AI-powered learner corpora provided examples and feedback drawn only from local pupil texts and was embedded into a three-stage writing cycle: guided drafting, AI-mediated exploration and targeted revision. The design was informed by the Technology Acceptance Model and the Expectation–Confirmation Model, focusing on perceived usefulness, ease of use, satisfaction and continuance intention. Classroom observations and teacher reflections showed that pupils became more willing to revise and exhibited clearer control of basic sentence structure and cohesion. Teachers reported reduced example-generation workload and more focused conferencing. However, the impact on idea development was modest, some weaker writers engaged in formulaic borrowing and digital literacy differences shaped access to benefits. This paper concludes with practical recommendations for pedagogy, equity-focused scaling and future mixed-methods research on AI-powered learner corpora in school-based ESL writing.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Wei Lun Wong, Sandiway Fong (Author)