Utilizing Grammarly in Evaluating Academic Writing: A Narrative Research on Efl Students’ Experience

Abstract

With the development of technology, any writer now can easily check their academic writing with automated writing evaluation program. Though, the utilization of this program may bring both benefits and drawbacks. Thus, a consideration of its strengths and weaknesses is needed. To fill the need, this study aimed to identify the strengths and weaknesses of Grammarly program as an automated writing evaluation program in evaluating academic writing. Using a narrative inquiry in exploring three Indonesian postgraduate students’ experiences by conducting interview and documentation, the result showed that this program has provided useful color-coded feedback with explanation and example, ease of account access, high rate of evaluation speed, and free service for evaluating academic writing. However, some caveats were also found in this program utilization, such as several misleading feedbacks, weaknesses on detecting the type of English and reference list, and lack of context and content evaluation experienced, which became the weaknesses of this program. Further investigation on the efficiency of the feedback given by Grammarly in improving students’ writing quality is needed.

An automated writing evaluation (AWE) in higher education

“…The questionnaire results also reveal that Grammarly's feedback does not always help some students because the feedback might be challenging to digest, not comprehensive enough, or not conform to their expectations. Previous research (Ghufron & Rosyida, 2018;Nova, 2018;Parra & Calero, 2019) resonates with the present study. Although Grammarly has been developed to detect run-on sentences, dangling expressions, sentence fragments, and difficult-to-understand sentences, such an AWE tool can still detect the organization, structure, or flow of the ideas or content.…”

“…It cannot capture the coherence level between sentences and paragraphs. Misleading feedbacks were also noted in Nova's (2018) study in which the students identified inaccuracies because the results did not conform to their intention. Grammarly's over-checking feature is another challenge because it may consider the reference writing incorrect, mostly the authors' names.…”

“…Grammarly's over-checking feature is another challenge because it may consider the reference writing incorrect, mostly the authors' names. As Nova (2018) found out, this tool's most noticeable weakness is that Grammarly can only approve American English to automatically consider British English, particularly the spelling incorrect.…”

“…The results showed that in addition to the reduced errors in diction, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, Grammarly could enhance the students' motivation to be autonomous learners. Nova's (2018) study • RQ 2: Is there any difference between the students across cohorts regarding their perceptions about the use of Grammarly in the writing class?…”

Videoconferencing for Speaking Assessment Medium: Alternative or Drawback?

“…Meanwhile, for writing, they can ask the students to write a piece of writing and submit them to an automated writing evaluation program which provides analytical program for detecting any grammatical errors and its feedback on the writing (Nova, 2018; Wang,…”