  ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art (SOTA) chatbot. Although it has potential to
support English as a foreign language (EFL) students' writing, to effectively
collaborate with it, a student must learn to engineer prompts, that is, the
skill of crafting appropriate instructions so that ChatGPT produces desired
outputs. However, writing an appropriate prompt for ChatGPT is not
straightforward for non-technical users who suffer a trial-and-error process.
This paper examines the content of EFL students' ChatGPT prompts when
completing a writing task and explores patterns in the quality and quantity of
the prompts. The data come from iPad screen recordings of secondary school EFL
students who used ChatGPT and other SOTA chatbots for the first time to
complete the same writing task. The paper presents a case study of four
distinct pathways that illustrate the trial-and-error process and show
different combinations of prompt content and quantity. The cases contribute
evidence for the need to provide prompt engineering education in the context of
the EFL writing classroom, if students are to move beyond an individual
trial-and-error process, learning a greater variety of prompt content and more
sophisticated prompts to support their writing.
