research trends in technology-mediated corrective feedback on writing skills: a systematic review of publications on grammarly from 2016 to 2021

Despite controversial debates towards the role of cf in instruction or the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (wcf), a body of research has revealed its contribution to learners’ grammar and writing development. hence, no questions remain anymore about whether to provide cf but how to do so. grammarly as technology-mediated feedback has shown that awcf tools might contribute to sla. this systematic review aims to analyze and synthesize empirical literature on wcf to check the effectiveness of grammarly on learners’ writing. the purpose of the study is to identify the analytical framework, research orientation, and dominant approaches regarding grammarly. moreover, the study tends to investigate whether grammarly has any effect on improving writing ability by means of immediate feedback followed by a metalinguistic explanation. searching the literature systematically, the researchers searched three leading databases, including web of science, scopus, and eric. based on the framework utilized by macaro et al. (2018) and macaro et al. (2012) consisting of the search strategy, the inclusion/exclusion criteria, the in-depth review procedure, and the synthesizing procedure, the study used a three-phase selection and analysis technique in which high-quality peer-reviewed journals were selected to focus on the recent studies related to grammarly and to investigate the use of mediating feedback. reviewing the empirical studies from 2012 to 2021, we found 126 studies relating to grammarly and its advantages and challenges in sla. the finding of studies on the effects of grammarly on writing are mixed. several studies reported positive effects on writing while few studies also report discouraging findings. grounded on sociological theory (sct), some sla research argued that language learners tend to resort to different sorts of mediation and tools to adjust their knowledge and understanding. the study’s implications for instructors and language learners who use grammarly to improve their writing skills are discussed.