Cultivating Global Writers: The Role of AI in Creating Authentic Writing Situations for Young Learners

Interest and engagement are crucial for literacy acquisition, as students who are engaged in reading and writing activities learn more effectively. However, stimulating interest and engagement in school contexts can be challenging. Reading and writing are by their very nature communicative activities, and a main driver behind engaging in them is a need to communicate. Out of school, children routinely write purposefully, in order to communicate, for example, within the family or with friends, on game platforms, or in different kinds of social networks. In these cases, children have real-world reasons for writing, and they are writing to an authentic audience-people who are interested in discovering what they have to communicate. In school, possibilities for such authentic writing are of course also present. The teacher is a privileged audience for the students’ writing, as are classmates. It is however challenging to leverage these readers to create authentic writing situations on a continuous basis. Both teacher and classmates have many other roles with regard to the students that interfere with the role as interested reader. The shared history in the classroom will, for example, often eliminate the need to communicate in writing. As a result, writing instruction is dominated by “artificial” tasks without authentic audiences. The recent entry of digital tools in schools opens up opportunities for engaging with the world beyond the classroom, for example, through blogging or exchanging texts with students in other schools or abroad. The current expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) could further enhance these opportunities for collaboration.