Exploring Students’ Perception On The Effectiveness Of “Grammarly Software” In Academic Writing

The presence of many software in the internet can simplify students for learning writing. However, the effectiveness of those software may provide both benefits and drawbacks. Thus, this study aimed to explore students’ perception on Grammarly software and several aspects of academic writing that could be improved by Grammarly. The researcher used qualitative method through semi-structured interview to obtain the data. Purposive sampling was applied to choose the participants who fulfilled the criteria in this research. The samples were eight of English Language Department students in Universitas Islam Negeri Ar-Raniry, who have used the Grammarly. The findings were discussed into two topics based on the research questions and then analyzed descriptively. The results of the data showed that this program has provided free accessibility, automatic correction, and useful feedback as the benefits. Meanwhile, two drawbacks were found in this program, such as misleading and over-checking. Besides, there were four aspects of academic writing that helped by Grammarly; complexity, objectivity, formality and hedging. Students agreed that Grammarly was useful for learning academic writing.