Is GenAI a friend or foe?
This was the question we posed to new tutors during our Pre-sessional* induction at the University of Southampton. It’s a question that also resonates with our international students – many of whom arrive with limited awareness of UK academic norms, but growing familiarity with GenAI tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek or Grammarly.
As educators, we’re tasked with helping students navigate this complex space. For international students in particular, the stakes are high: misuse of GenAI, even unintentional, can lead to academic misconduct – a concept that may be entirely new. But with the right guidance, GenAI can also become a powerful tool for language development, critical thinking and academic confidence. So how do we support our international students in finding the balance?
* The Pre-sessional programme is an English for Academic Purposes entry pathway for international students
AI as a language and literacy tool
On our Pre-sessional programmes, we frame AI not as a shortcut, but as a skill. Our Pre-sessional Prompt Guide introduces students to the PREP/EDIT framework (Fitzpatrick et al, 2023) – a structured approach to crafting effective prompts that mirrors academic communication. Students learn to:
- PREP: Set a clear purpose, role, and parameters for the AI.
- EDIT: Evaluate, discuss, improve and test the AI’s responses.
This approach helps students use GenAI to summarise readings, explore research questions, and reflect on their writing. Crucially, it also builds their academic English, digital literacy, and critical awareness – skills they’ll need throughout their degree.
Creating a safe space for ethical experimentation
We have found that international students often worry about ‘getting it wrong’ with GenAI and have also expressed a need to know why they can or cannot use it for certain tasks. To address this, we provide clear, accessible GenAI Student Guidance, FAQs, videos and tutor-led discussions. For example:
- Students can use GenAI to generate ideas or check grammar – but not to write or translate full assignments. We explicitly link our guidance to our learning objectives and explain why they can or cannot use GenAI for a particular task.
- They’re encouraged to save AI conversations and discuss them with tutors.
- We emphasise that different departments have different rules, and that asking questions is always encouraged.
This clarity helps students feel safe to explore GenAI tools without fear of accidental misconduct. It also reinforces the message that GenAI is a support, not a substitute for their learning.
Training the trainers
Supporting students starts with supporting staff and on the Pre-sessional programmes we employ approximately 200 tutors, all with varying degrees of, and attitudes towards, AI literacy. Our PS Tutor Induction AI Task invites educators to use GenAI to plan and draft a Pre-sessional-style essay. They then reflect on:
- What was useful?
- What was misleading or problematic?
- How might a student misuse this?
- How could it support or hinder language development?
This hands-on approach helps tutors build empathy for students’ experiences and equips them to model ethical, effective GenAI use in the classroom.
Bite-sized task
Here, you can sample the experiential task that we gave our tutors. The aim is to develop an understanding of how our students experience GenAI in an academic context and reflect on those ideas in relation to our own teaching.
Step 1 – learn
Watch the short student guidance video:
AND/OR explore the Pre-sessional Prompt Guide.
Step 2 – do
Try the PS Tutor Induction AI Task: use an AI tool to create an essay (feel free to create something more appropriate to your own teaching) using prompts like:
- “Can you create an outline for an essay on [topic]?”
- “What are some academic sources I could use?”
- “Can you write a 100-word introduction?”
Then reflect on the experience.
Step 3 – reflect
- What surprised you about the AI’s responses?
- How might your students interpret or misuse this?
- How could you model ethical use in your own teaching?
Join the conversation
Post your thoughts on the weekly Teams post to join the conversation.
Further links
The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education
Generative AI working group – information for UoS staff
Generative AI Hub | Teaching & Learning – UCL – University College London
Contributor biography
Philippa Bunch is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the Academic Centre for International Students (ACIS), University of Southampton, where she is Director of Pre-sessional Programmes – an academic entry pathway for international students which brings in between 1500-1800 (mainly postgraduate) students a year. She also teaches across the university year-round, providing in-sessional English for Academic Purposes support. As a member of the university’s GenAI Working Group, she advocates for fair and inclusive support for international learners.
© 2025. This work is openly licensed via CC BY-NC-SA