Reconceptualizing the L2 Writing Process: GenAI–Human-Mediated Feedback Through Ecological Languaging Competencies

Abstract

Generative AI (GenAI) has transformed L2 writing, producing human-like prose but often impersonal feedback. This study explores the potential of GenAI–human collaborative feedback, focusing on the first author’s experience as a teaching assistant in a Hong Kong public university’s Bachelor of Education (English language track). Grounded in Ecological Languaging Competencies (ELC) and its affordance framework, this study employs an ethnographic approach informed by narrative inquiry and phenomenology. Data were drawn from Zoom tutoring sessions incorporating interview-style questions to investigate participants’ perspectives and experiences, GenAI-student conversation logs, and final assignments in order to analyze two multilingual students’ GenAI–human-mediated L2 writing processes. Findings are organized around three ELC-informed themes: (1) whole-body sense-making and the meshing of first-order languaging and second-order language; (2) individual languaging agency within a distributed ecosystem; and (3) environmental affordances and functional fit. In both cases, GenAI demonstrates consistent limitations in facilitating the situated, embodied, and affectively attuned dimensions of languaging that effective L2 writing entails. This study makes two contributions: it extends ELC’s affordance network to tertiary-level GenAI–human-mediated L2 writing, and it reconceptualizes writerly authorship as a distributed yet agentively orchestrated practice. Moreover, co-agentic GenAI–human feedback foregrounds ecological embeddedness, writerly agency, and ethical GenAI integration.