Students’ Perception on Using Google Translate as a Tool to Assist Writing Learning

This study aimed to investigate students’ perception on using Google Translate (GT) as an assisting tool in writing learning and the aspects of writing that are perceived to be well-assisted by GT. This research employed qualitative method with a semi-structured interview as the instrument to obtain the data. The participants were ten students of English Language Education Department of Universitas Islam Negeri Ar-Raniry who were selected purposively. The finding show that most of the students admitted that they used Google translate because of several reasons including its easiness and simplicity, free access, and practicality. Moreover, in term of the benefits, there were four benefits of GT perceived by the students in which it is flexible, it has many features, and it can translate to the level of sentences and paragraphs. As for the drawbacks, it was found that there were two drawbacks of GT which were probability of wrong translations and incorrect sentence structure. Moreover, the finding revealed that there were three aspects of writing that are perceived to be well-assisted by Google Translate; they are vocabulary, spelling and synonym.