Writing a Fairy Tale with a Little Help of ChatGPT – Prompting Experiences of Fourth-Graders

Abstract

In our article, we analyse prompt protocols that were collected in a study at a local primary school. 24 fourth-graders wrote a fairy tale in pairs of two and used GPT-4o for their text production. The prompt protocols (n=11) offer an insight into the writing process and show that prompting is not only an important writing skill in the age of AI but is also quite complex. To describe its complexity, we use a linguistic methodology analysing each prompt (n=92) produced by the writers. The analysis identifies three primary prompt procedures – imperative requests, polar (yes-no) questions, and wh-questions – which account for over 80 % of all utterances. A formalism is introduced to encode the structure and function of these prompts systematically, revealing patterns such as quantification, specification, and content targeting. Prompt use is further examined in relation to the resulting pupils’ texts, with a typology distinguishing between complete and partial adoptions of AI output.