Grammarly Feedback on EFL Learners’ Writing: Feedback Precision and Student Perceptions
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Abstract
Grammarly has increasingly gained momentum as one of the most widely used automated essay evaluation platform. However, Grammarly’s enhanced popularity is not accompanied by sufficient empirical evidence about its performance on EFL students’ writing. The current study is, therefore, conceived to investigate the precision of Grammarly automated feedback in identifying the most common grammatical errors among EFL learners, namely Determiners, Verb Forms, and Subject-Verb agreement and EFL tertiary students’ perceptions of this tool while incorporating it into their writing processes. Quantitative analyses of 99 students’ argumentative writing reveal that Grammarly con-sistently exhibits a high level of precision across various error categories with a precision rate of 84.93%, with the detection of Determiner errors standing out as particularly accurate. Qualitative in-sights from eight semi-structured interviews showed that students acknowledged the benefits of Grammarly and exhibited confidence in this tool. However, some students also experienced a sense of detachment or identified constraints in the feedback they received. It is concluded that Gram-marly can support writing improvement, but it should be used alongside teacher feedback and in-struction. Main pedagogical implications include using Grammarly as a supplementary formative assessment tool and encouraging students to critically engage with automated feedback.
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