EFL Students' Language Accuracy Development through Self-Assessment from Online Written Feedback: How Do They Experience and Perceive It?

Abstract

Despite myriad studies on writing assessment, those that focus on students' self-assessment in an online writing context remain underexplored. The current descriptive qualitative design explores the EFL students' experiences and perceptions of their language accuracy development through self-assessment from online written feedback (OWF). The study involved 30 EFL students enrolled in a university-level writing course who were required to submit their writing drafts online in Google Docs, and six of them were recruited to participate voluntarily in the semi-structured interview session. This study fills the gap by portraying how EFL students self-assess their language errors with different severity levels since teachers provided OWF through the Grammarly tool. The findings reported that although EFL students experienced internal and external challenges in self-assessment from OWF, most engaged with self-assessment from Grammarly as an OWF tool for specifically identifying their language errors. They believed it could help them develop a greater sense of ownership over their language-learning process, promote learner autonomy, and boost their motivation to learn writing. Most students had positive perspectives on implementing self-assessment through OWF, particularly on improving their language accuracy, so their writing drafts looked more accurate and readable.