Search results

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has seen exponential growth in recent years due to its capability to generate original content through natural language processing and comprehensive language models. This paper aims to investigate the transformative impact of GAI on higher education, focusing on the evolving roles of faculty in the classroom.

Using a phenomenological perspective and a process approach, the study involved 25 semi-structured interviews with academicians in higher education.

The findings reveal that GAI currently creates biased and commercially driven learning environments, challenging traditional pedagogical models. Despite its potential for enhancing education, the autonomous nature of GAI often prioritizes commercial interests over pedagogical goals.

The study is limited to faculty perspectives, suggesting future research should include student viewpoints and diverse educational contexts.

The study highlights the need for higher education institutions to develop comprehensive policies, provide training for faculty and students and design new courses that leverage GAI for personalized learning experiences and enhanced faculty research.

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on GAI’s impact on education, highlighting its dual nature as both a transformative tool and a potential threat to traditional educational roles and outcomes.

Investigating the dialogistic resources within a multiplicity of popularized disciplines shall provide further insight into the interpersonal status of popular science book writing, which can be converted into transferrable writing skills to (post)graduate students in the Saudi educational context. This study aims to investigate the representation of authorial and external voice in popular science book writing (PSBW), exemplified by the lexico-grammatical resources that make up a proposition (i.e. the statement or the argument by which the author conveys their voice) within the writer’s discourse.

The study uses a mixed-method approach to analyze how authorial and external voice is represented through the lexico-grammatical resources from a 93,078-word corpus extracted from various popular science book writings. The authorial and external voice is analyzed by the UAM CorpusTool3.

The results suggest significant differences between hard and soft disciplines, suggesting that popular science book writings employ discipline-specific lexico-grammatical phrases appropriate to projecting both the authorial voice and that of the external one. The scalability of projecting authorial and external voices seems to depend on whether the topic belongs to a hard or soft discipline. Hard science disciplines tend to insert their voices assertively, while more authors of soft science disciplines tend to treat the proposition in a spectrum of possibilities and give more affordances to the external voice with which they interact.

Part of this analysis was to interpret the analyzed popular science corpus in the context of writing pedagogy and realize this interpretation within the most recently reported state on scientific writing in Saudi higher education. The literature presently shows a scarcity of English writing programs across Saudi universities. Not all programs have made it mundane to teach scientific writing to (post)graduate students from various scientific disciplines. Designing long-term scientific writing programs is of utmost importance to tackle the writing difficulties, as reported by researchers such as Al-Harbi (2021), who also train students to develop audience-oriented writing skills.

Integrating popular science text in scientific writing programs should be in the early stages and should not remain constant throughout the duration of the course because it is meant as a timely intervention to help (post)graduate students cross over from one genre to the scientific writing genre. It should ideally provide them with the ability to shift the orientation of their writing, accordingly, making them, for example, mindful of the targeted reader. Depending on the type of reader, whether an expert or otherwise, the student-constructed discourse should naturally align with the conventions and the discourse of the discipline.

In multiple reports within the literature, Saudi university students face writing difficulties not only at the undergraduate level but also at the (post)graduate level. Reportedly, they are marred by the lack of communicative, rhetorical function and discourse knowledge, along with linguistic issues in employing appropriate hedging or conjugating a justification for a claim while constructing an academic discourse. Therefore, this study brings an analysis of popular science books and interprets them in light of their viability as teaching materials, in the hope that they diversify the EAP content, ameliorate the writing deficiencies and elicit audience-oriented writing and thinking skills.