Assessment of EFL Teachers' and Students' Writing Skills by Using the Grammarly Program

Lecturers and students may now use automated online tools to undertake corrective assessments when assessing their EFL writing skills for different academic purposes. Grammarly is an automated internet program and an online proofreading service that checks for plagiarism and the accuracy of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary. This study examined the Grammarly program's usage to assess EFL teachers' and students' writing skills. The qualitative method was used to collect data by interviewing 5 lecturers and writing assessments for 10 students. The results of the study revealed several writing mistakes the students committed, both in accuracy and clarity. In writing, correctness is concerned with following the rules of mechanics, whereas clarity is concerned with using clear, succinct language. Although grammatical problems in students' papers include subject-verb disagreement, the abuse of the passive voice, and imprecise, wordy, and unfinished sentences, spelling mistakes are often seen as text consistency issues, misspelling words, and poor formatting. The study tries to answer these two questions to find out the results of using the Grammarly application. The questions are: 1. Do Kurdish EFL students' writing scores significantly differ after using Grammarly software? 2. How do the Kurdish EFL teachers feel about utilizing Grammarly in their writing classes? The study findings demonstrate that lecturers may evaluate and analyze in depth while correcting students' grammatical problems without exerting much effort. For instructors who need to edit -EFL students' work, Grammarly might be considered a helpful tool. Grammarly will automatically verify or recognize the writing as it is entered based on several relevant factors. While this happens, punctuation problems may be seen in the overuse of commas inside clauses, incorrect configuration, and inappropriate punctuation marks in compound/complex sentences.