Grammarly in Teaching Writing to EFL Learners at Low Levels: How Useful Is It?

Abstract

This study aims at identifying the extent to which Grammarly can improve low-level EFL learners’ writing and the types of errors that Grammarly can help learners avoid most. Two groups of low-level English as a foreign language learners (30 female students each) taught by the same teacher participated in this study. Errors made by the two groups in a pretest and a posttest were identified and compared. The results show that the experimental group performed better than the control group in the posttest, which suggests that Grammarly can generally help low-level students improve their writing skills. Findings also show that some errors were more amenable to correction and feedback whereas others, namely grammatical errors related to word forms and word usage, were resistant, and no noticeable improvement was attested.