THE IMPACT OF AUTOMATED WRITTEN CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK ON EFL LEARNERS' ACADEMIC WRITING ACCURACY

The positive effect of Corrective Feedback (CF) on students' writing performance has been a topic of dispute for a long time. The dominant belief around this issue is that students benefit from feedback to a certain extent. However, there is no consensus on what type of feedback can achieve that or the effect of CF provision on language learning in general. This study investigates the impact of Automated Written Corrective Feedback (AWCF), namely Grammarly AI-powered writing assistant, on students' academic writing accuracy. After being allotted to control and experimental groups, sixty-four university students participated in the study. The participants underwent a pre-test to validate their homogeneity and levels and a post-test to explore the effect of using Grammarly on the written work of the experimental group. The main finding of the research is that after 14 weeks of using Grammarly, the experimental group members showed a significant improvement in their written accuracy compared to the control members. Moreover, it was found that the progress was represented in a substantial drop in the number of errors pertaining to specific categories while errors of other types remained unaffected. The implications of the findings are discussed, and suggestions for further research are presented.