Artificial Intelligence Integration for Teaching and Learning English Writing: A Systematic Review on Strategies (2021-2025)

Abstract

In today’s digital era, English education landscape has been profoundly reshaped by the growing presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across schools and higher education institutions. AI has quickly become a valued tool among educators and learners, particularly for English writing, a skill often perceived as laborious and complex. Writing is often viewed as the most challenging between reading, speaking, and listening as it requires active language production. Although AI tools offer personalised support and instant feedback to improve English writing instruction, their use in ESL classrooms and English for elementary and high school levels remains limited. Educators often face obstacles such as limited training, experience and clear guidance on integrating AI effectively. Despite growing interest for AI use in education, there remains a shortage of in-depth reviews exploring application of these tools to support English writing instruction in these specific contexts. By reviewing 25 past papers from the year 2021 to 2025, this systematic literature review paper provides fresh insights into AI integration in teaching and learning of English writing, instead of traditional teaching models, to foster learner-centred and autonomous learning, enhances writing skills, improves engagement, motivation and self-efficacy among students while reducing teachers’ workload. Drawing insights from Scopus, Web of Science and ERIC databases, this systematic literature review paper sheds light on the range of AI tools integrated and strategies of AI tool integration according to roles, for English writing lessons. For English writing instruction, ChatGPT emerged as the most popularly used whereas the most common strategy of AI use was as automated feedback tool, followed by as assessment tool and paraphrasing tool. Building on these findings, future research should further explore AI-supported English writing instruction in Malaysia, investigate gamebased learning and gamification with AI for English writing, and develop online English writing modules with integrated AI features.