How L2 Learners Negotiate Meaning in GenAI‐Supported Creative Writing

This qualitative study explores how second language (L2) learners negotiate meaning and co‐construct knowledge with generative AI (GenAI) in a 12‐week multimodal creative writing project. Chinese middle school students ( N = 75) created English picture books using a conversational GenAI agent supporting textual and text‐to‐image generation. By extreme‐case sampling, 28 focal participants (14 high‐ and 14 low‐performing) were selected based on creative product quality. Student‐AI textual interaction logs were analyzed using the Negotiation for Meaning (NfM) framework and Gunawardena and colleagues’ Interaction Analysis Model (IAM), supplemented by artifact analysis and interviews. Results revealed distinct patterns: high‐performing learners showed active, evaluative engagement with longer prompts, higher NfM completion rates, and deeper IAM phases. They treated GenAI as a scaffold for linguistic and multimodal refinement while retaining strong authorial control. Low‐performing learners, conversely, displayed passive patterns with vague prompts and greater AI content retention, yielding a weaker personal voice. Findings suggest creative outcomes in GenAI‐assisted L2 multimodal writing depend more on depth of meaning negotiation and strategic mediation than interaction frequency. The study extends interactionist and sociocultural perspectives to GenAI‐mediated creative genres and underscores scaffolds for negotiation competence and authorial agency.