Online Corrective Feedback to explore EFL Learners: A Case Study of Higher Education Students from North Sumatera Indonesia

Abstract

Providing feedback on student writing remains an important research topic. Due to the numerous numbers of student assignments papers, technology is a solution for teachers overwhelmed by providing feedback and correction by handwriting. Few studies have been conducted to investigate the students’ linguistic problems through the online application platform to provide feedback especially in Indonesia. This research, therefore, aimed to explore the Indonesian EFL students’ linguistic problems using “Grammarly” as the online application. This study adopted the ex-post facto design to investigate the assignment written by 54 fourth-semester students of the English department in the Scientific Writing course. Participants’ linguistic problems were classified, identified, and categorized by submitting the soft copy to the application. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences was used to obtain the average, standard deviation, and significant differences in accordance to the linguistic problems between male and female students. The result stated that grammar is the major problem possessed by students. Furthermore, it is expected to provide feedback for students and lecturers in the learning process of Scientific Writing.