enriching the zone of audacity through ai-assisted corrective feedback: iranian efl learners’ writing anxiety revisited

Among the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking, writing skill deems more challenging as it demands more audacity to be activated and trigger the passive knowledge into an accurate and cohesive output. no doubt, corrective feedback plays a crucial role. this study aimed at depicting the engagement of artificial intelligence bots into the process of efl learners’ writing tasks. the 60 iranian efl sophomores were selected via an opt test of language proficiency, and randomly assigned into two groups of experimental and control. the experimental groups were trained to receive corrective feedback, one experimental via ai-bots and one experimental via teacher-n-peers, to improve their performance in writing tasks. the control group followed the conventional trend and received no corrective feedback. the design of the present study was quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design. the accredited writing anxiety questionnaire along with a validated writing-tasks test, were the instrument of the present study and they were administered before and after the treatment. the data obtained from the pretest and posttest phases went through statistical analysis by computer program spss 24. the result confirmed that the artificial-intelligence-assisted group outperformed the teacher-n-peers-assisted group significantly and it was due to the application of ai-assisted bots in conducting the corrective feedback in writing course. the findings would be beneficial for efl teachers, learners, policy makers in the tefl field.