Let's try: Grammarly!

 Do you want to improve your students' English grammar in writing? Meet Grammarly.

   When you write in English, you usually use Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar checker before sending any document. You think that's enough, Don't you? Unfortunately, it's not. It's not even enough as Word is not designed to be your safety net against spelling and grammatical errors. This is why today we will introduce a technological tool that will help students a lot when writing a text in English, especially in the grammatical field. 

    Grammarly is an application or extension for your browser that checks grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. It also has a plagiarism detector that checks over 16 billion web pages.  With this English spell checker, you will be able to write emails, contracts, and all kinds of texts in English correctly and in a very simple way.

Here is a video that better explains how to use Grammarly:

Why is this particular tool or technology relevant to teaching writing purposes?

Grammarly software is effective to help teachers and learners in correcting EFL writing. It is because Grammarly is not only able to identify punctuation (such as the missing spaces after the periods) and the spelling mistakes, including the proper noun and provided several alternative possibilities for the misspelled words, but also identify fragments and offer advice on verb form, although often no suggested corrections are presented, and explanations were complex (Daniels & Leslie, 2013).    If you are studying English this tool will help you to check the grammar of your texts as it will explain the mistakes you are doing, so it will not only help you to correct but also learn in the process. Among the reasons to use Grammarly is that this application is very simple to use, you don't have to be a computer genius to use this software. All you have to do is install the add-on or browser extension.

    Just like in Microsoft Word and Google Docs spell checker, Grammarly will underline incorrect words or grammar, and show you how to replace them and why. It is perfect when it comes to proofreading your work and editing faster. As you type, it will correct you, instead of typing everything and then clicking the check spelling and grammar button. Feedback is a traditional instructional tool for writing the course to improve the students’ writing skill. It can be used to highlight the errors in EFL writing tasks, i.e., grammatical errors, spelling errors, diction errors, and so on (Wichadee, 2013).  

   This software makes a few many mistakes. Occasionally, it may misunderstand what you are trying to say or put a comma where it is not necessary. However, overall it has a high accuracy rate. Just be aware of why it is asking you to change something and only accept if it is correct to you.

    Grammarly won't just tell you when something is wrong, this program goes a step further with   explanations so you can understand and improve. 

    So not only are you getting the benefit of much more polished writing, but you are also learning grammar, having a real-time teacher who will not let you pass any mistake.

    The main approach that this tool has is that it helps greatly to improve vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, and grammar in general in the texts, in addition to providing suggestions of quotes for better writing in the writings being of great help to whoever implements it. 

Why might you use it to foster language learning?

    Learning another language is not a simple matter, especially if in addition to learning new words and pronunciation, you must learn the dreaded grammar. Grammarly will help you to check this aspect in your text to see if it is correct, otherwise, it will assist you in the correction. Having the support of new technologies to learn new languages is very important because they make this a self-managed method, improving the quality of learning. 

    As you have already seen Grammarly is an English corrector, it is not going to write for you, this means that you have to know English, you have to express yourself more or less correctly so that this tool can detect what you want to say and then offer you the most correct option. This technological tool can be used by anyone who has a basic knowledge of the language but I would recommend it for high school students as well as university students to improve their grammar. 

How to use it with students?

What limitations can you see with the use of this technology for the purposes of language learning?

    The development of the writing skill not only consists in technical aspects such as punctuation and use of grammatical structures properly, but it is also about the ability to bring cohesion, consistency, progression, and creativity to the writing process. Those aspects are referred to metacognition skills in students.Thus, having that in mind, this app can only contribute to improve a 50% of the students' work regarded the first aspects mentioned. The other 50% of achievement relies on students themselves, their own evaluation towards what they have created with the guide of the teacher to boost accomplishment in all the aspects a good piece of writing requires. This is not a question of correct or incorrect, of etiquette or custom. This is a matter of far higher importance. As Murray (1972) states ''The writer, as he writes, is making ethical decisions. He doesn't test his words by a rule book, but by life. He uses language to reveal the truth to himself so that he can tell it to others. It is an exciting, eventful, evolving process.'' 

    Among other the limitations of this application is that it does not work on all devices. There is only one important one missing and that is the Word add-in for MacOS if we talk about commercial suites. There is also no add-in for suites like OpenOffice or LibreOffice.Also, its free version is very limited, it only has one function, correcting spelling and grammar. While this may seem like a major disadvantage to some, it is perfectly acceptable to others.

    You should also know that your level of English must be good as If you write sentences or texts with many errors, it is possible that the software does not interpret correctly what you want to say and the result will not be satisfactory.

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References:

Daniels, P., & Leslie, D. (2013). Grammar software ready for EFL writers? OnCue Journal, 9(4), 391–401.

Murray, D. (1972). Teach writing as a process not product. The leaflet, 71(3), 11-14.

Wichadee, S. (2013). Peer feedback on Facebook: The use of social networking websites to develop writing ability of undergraduate students. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 14(4), 260–270. https://doi.org/10.17718/TOJDE.25470.

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 If you want to know more about this tool, go to https://app.grammarly.com/ to make use its multiple functionalities and write text in a better way.