feedback through grammarly® and its effect on efl students’ writing skills and attitudes

The study was an attempt to investigate the effects of computer-based feedback through grammarly® on the l2 writing skills and writing attitudes of lower and upper intermediate iranian efl learners. forty lower intermediate and 40 upper intermediate level male and female learners with the age range of 20 to 26 studying teaching english as a foreign language (tefl), english translation studies, and english literature at kerman institute of higher education were selected through a standard version of opt as the homogeneity test. then, based on the rating scale of the placement test, the participants were divided into two control and two experimental groups. these participants represented the two experimental sub-groups namely, grammarly® correction group (gcg) who enjoyed using the grammarly® software to receive feedback and the teacher-correction group (tcg) who received the teacher feedback. to apply the treatment, the subjects in the gcg were asked to develop 8 writing tasks all in 150-190 words during the treatment using the grammarly® software. however, in tcg, the teacher himself provided feedback and assessed the students’ process of learning. following intervention sessions, the writing posttest which was run to measure the learners’ ability in using l2 writing skills was given to the study participants. the findings of the investigation revealed that grammarly® software had a significant and positive effect on both upper and lower intermediate level learners’ writing. in addition, grammarly® software had a positive and significant effect on the efl learners’ writing skills such as task response, cohesion, coherence, grammatical accuracy, and lexical resource. accordingly, the grammarly® toolbox improved the writing skills of the experimental subgroup learners compared to the learners in the control subgroups. moreover, the findings indicated that there was no significant difference between the development of l2 writing skills of lower intermediate and upper intermediate learners.