I teach a class of mid- and low-progress students English, and as might be expected, writing is their Achilles’ heel.

But young Singaporeans’ Chinese proficiency generally lags behind their English proficiency, so I don’t envy their Mother Tongue teachers. It is not uncommon for students to use English words and phrases liberally in their Chinese essays because they don’t know how to express themselves in Chinese.

This may explain why my Mother Tongue colleagues relied heavily on SchoolAI as a tool to aid their students in their writing. I admire their dedication. It seemed from their workflow that they painstakingly pasted each student’s first draft on SchoolAI and got it to churn out a personalised model essay.

Subsequently, they got their students to prompt SchoolAI to increase the sophistication of their writing by using the mnemonic FAST. A sophisticated essay, according to my country’s national exam rubrics, will showcase the writer’s use of ‘Show Not Tell’ phrases and Chinese idioms, so the FAST mnemonic is a crutch that reminds students to add more descriptive details.

Students were guided to sieve out useful phrases and sentences from the model essay and use them to write their 2nd draft. Predictably, most students showed an improvement in their writing for the second draft. No distracting English words at the very least!

Final Thoughts In an ideal world, students would have sought to improve their writing through extensive reading. They read a wide variety of texts from diverse authors, extract the phrases that resonate with them and think strategically about how they can apply them in their own writing. Some teachers will even shape their students’ writing by selecting authentic paragraphs written by established authors as mentor texts. However, not many students are keen on reading in the first place. And the short runway teachers have before their students have to sit for the Primary School Leaving Examination necessitates educators to think to AI and employ it as a short-gap measure. But if teachers rely on AI as a tool, when will we get our students to confront the inadequacies of their writing and learn to improve on their own?

I have no ready solutions. With my own son, I have decided to impart writing skills at the sentence level, such as introducing a popularly used idiom in a sentence. However, my English class has 34 students, of which about half of them have failed their recent final-year essay exam. I will probably resort to tools such as SchoolAI next year.