The Effectiveness of Using Grammarly in Teaching Writing Among Indonesian Undergraduate EFL Students

Abstract

In light of the current controversies and concerns surrounding Grammarly, this article discusses one specific way in which Grammarly can be used effectively in teaching L2 writing. This study used a switching replication design under the experimental design and involved eighty first-year students of English Education Department from a public university in Banten Province, Indonesia, taking a writing course. They were divided into two groups, experimental and control. Pre-tests and post-tests were administered to the students, followed by distributing open-ended online questionnaires to them at the end of the course. An interview was conducted with the writing teacher. Related to the interview, the experiences of the teacher were retrieved and discussed. The results showed that although the writing scores of the students from the experimental group improved significantly from the pre-tests to post-tests, there was no significant difference compared to the writing scores of the students from the control group. Further, the Gain Scores of both groups indicated that the use of Grammarly was not more effective enough than the teacher corrective feedback to teach writing in an EFL class. The students further perceived that Grammarly was a beneficial learning tool. The teacher admitted that using Grammarly could save the time spent evaluating the works of the students. A recommendation for future research is also mentioned.