Using Grammarly to Enhance Students’ Academic Writing Skills

The paper aims to present the results of the experiment in applying the online writing assistant Grammarly.com to evaluate ESP students’ essay writing skills. One hundred master students’ papers were processed by the application to identify persisting errors at a master’s level. Quantitative and qualitative methods enabled the researchers to analyze the essays by setting five parameters: audience, formality, domain, tone, and intent. At the other end, the application broke down the outcome by five measurable factors: correctness, clarity, delivery, engagement, and style issues. The representative number of the essays fed into Grammarly.com provided a vivid and reliable picture of which lexis, grammar, structure, or style issues still need addressing. The most common mistakes detected by Grammarly.com were punctuation, wordy sentences, redundancy, and the abundance of personal pronouns in a formal style. They show that the gaps in students’ academic writing need a remedial course. Another objective of the research was to explore the potential of the online writing tool for students’ self-study. Grammarly.com cannot do work for students: it cannot think for them, neither can it write for them, but it can help learners identify the reoccurring writing problems, eliminate them, and monitor the progress. The application could be particularly useful for advanced students. The functionality of the Grammarly premium version allows for a choice of styles, type of addressee, tone of writing, and many other nuances, which could be beneficial not only for studies but in future professional life. Nonetheless, despite Grammarly’s advanced features, it only suggests a better variant, sometimes it errs, and in no way is it a substitute for a teacher.

Second -Year English Majored Students’ Perception of Possible Problems in Writing Essays

To acquire a language, learners need to be skillful at the four skills namely: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among them, writing is usually considered a complex skill to learn. This study is aimed to investigate the second-year English majored students’ perception of essay writing problems encountered and solutions to overcome these problems. The participants of this study are 44 second year English majored students at a public university in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, consisting of 32 females and 12 males. The data were collected by a questionnaire to explore the difficulties encountered by EFL learners in writing essays and their expectations from their lecturers as well as from themselves to have better performance. The results revealed that students face major difficulties in writing essays including linguistic, psychological, cognitive factors. With the hope to get better writing performance, the students expected more assistance from their lecturers, including giving more feed backs on their writing pieces, recommending appropriate reading materials and providing more grammar courses. They also admitted that their writing pieces will be improved when they themselves practice more such as forming their writing habits, gaining more vocabularies and self-editing or asking feedback from peers.

INVESTIGATING ENGLISH WRITING PROBLEMS AMONG HIGH ACHIEVER POST-UPSR LEARNERS IN SABAH

The purpose of the study was to investigate the writing problems faced by the Post-UPSR learners during their primary school years. The data was obtained from 217 high achiever learners who scored an A on the UPSR. These learners, who had completed primary schools and taken the UPSR exam, are now enrolled in secondary schools as Form 1 learners. The method used is a quantitative study. A questionnaire was used as the instrument in the study. The analysis of the study uses SPSS which involves frequency and percentage. The data revealed that Malaysian ESL primary school learners struggle with writing tasks, particularly due to insufficient of vocabulary knowledge. The findings of the study will be valuable to ESL researchers and educators in assisting learners with their writing difficulties. Teachers or researchers can develop appropriate solutions to the issues once the writing issue has been identified.

Editing, Filling in Gaps, and Cutting

This chapter covers how to move from first draft to submittable draft. The chapter enumerates many of the writing problems that are present in first drafts, such as redundancy, logical leaps, unfinished thoughts, and unjustified statements. Ways to correct these problems are suggested, and writers are advised to consult with their mentors and coauthors as often as they feel they need to. The chapter also offers suggestions for cutting length to meet target journals’ space limits. The iterative character of editing is stressed, where text that is essential to the paper may become tangential (and vice versa) as the manuscript evolves. Authors are cautioned not to view earlier writing sessions as a waste of time if text generated during those sessions is removed from the paper.

Problems and Needs Analysis of English for Tourism Industry: A Case of Hotel Staff in Phang Nga Province, Thailand

Tourism is an important industry that has created a lot of income for many nations, including Thailand; therefore, it is essential to increase its potential as a more sustainable and successful industry, in particular to support a sustainable recovery of nations’ economies after a tough situation like Covid-19. The present study was carried out to investigate tourism staff’s problems and needs for using English at work and to explore their needs for improving English for their work. The participants were 200 hotel staff in Phang Nga Province, Thailand. Data were collected through a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed for data analysis. The findings showed that in general, the hotel staff’s problem in using English at work was at a moderate level (M=2.76, S.D.=1.11). They had English writing problems the most. They found it very difficult to write letters or e-mails in English. Regarding their needs for using English, it was found that every English skill was rated at a high level (M=3.75, S.D.=1.11), and English speaking was the most necessary. The hotel staff reported that they had to speak English to welcome, greet and say good-bye to foreign guests. Pertaining to their needs for improving English, overall, the hotel staff needed to improve their English skills at a high level (M=3.85, S.D.=0.98). They highly needed to improve their English use in every aspect, especially English listening. Based on the interview information, English courses, handbooks or applications relating to English for hotels are truly needed for their English use improvement.

Improvement of Writing Skills Among Students With Hearing Impairment Using the Cognitive Model: An Experimental Study

Being a vital aspect of literacy, writing skills have great importance in the academics of students with hearing impairment. Improvement in writing skills is one of the prominent purposes of school education. Limitations in hearing impact the writing skills of students with hearing impairment (SWHI) in addition to reading skills. The present study was designed to highlight the writing problems of SWHI and to improve their creative writing skills using a cognitive model of teaching writing skills proposed by Flower and Hayes. The true experimental research design was used to see the impact of cognitive-based teaching strategies on the writing skills of SWHI. Pretest, treatment, posttest design were used to conduct this study. The targeted population for this research was SWHI studying in the grade 7th in the schools of Lahore city. A total number of 10 SWHI of Grade 7th was selected from one school in Lahore city. An equal number of students were assigned to control (N=5) and experimental group(N=5). Four different types of instruments were used to conduct the study. The experiment was conducted in one school in Lahore city for two months. The treatment comprised of instructional strategies developed in the light of Flower and Hayes's model of cognitive development. The study explored a statistically significantdifference between the writing skills of the students of the experimental group (EG) than the writing skills of the control group's students. The writing skills of students who belong to EG have upgraded after receiving treatment. The study recommended the use of cognitive-based strategies for the improvement of writing skills of students with hearing impairment.

Problems and Needs Analysis of English for Tourism Industry: A Case of Hotel Staff in Phang Nga Province, Thailand

Tourism is an important industry that has created a lot of income for many nations, including Thailand; therefore, it is essential to increase its potential as a more sustainable and successful industry, in particular to support a sustainable recovery of nations’ economies after a tough situation like Covid-19. The present study was carried out to investigate tourism staff’s problems and needs for using English at work and to explore their needs for improving English for their work. The participants were 200 hotel staff in Phang Nga Province, Thailand. Data were collected through a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire and a semi-structured interview. Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed for data analysis. The findings showed that in general, the hotel staff’s problem in using English at work was at a moderate level (M=2.76, S.D.=1.11). They had English writing problems the most. They found it very difficult to write letters or e-mails in English. Regarding their needs for using English, it was found that every English skill was rated at a high level (M=3.75, S.D.=1.11), and English speaking was the most necessary. The hotel staff reported that they had to speak English to welcome, greet and say good-bye to foreign guests. Pertaining to their needs for improving English, overall, the hotel staff needed to improve their English skills at a high level (M=3.85, S.D.=0.98). They highly needed to improve their English use in every aspect, especially English listening. Based on the interview information, English courses, handbooks or applications relating to English for hotels are truly needed for their English use improvement.

An Analysis of Lexical Cohesion on the Students’ Writing

This research aims at finding lexical cohesion in high and low-graded lexical cohesion types on the students' narrative writing. The researcher wants to reveal the reasons why the writing problems exist in lexical cohesion and also to find out what way that the students will use to solve the lexical types in writing narrative text. The present research uses the types of lexical cohesion as proposed by Halliday and Matthiensen (2014). The lexical cohesion items consist of repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy. The data of this research are derived from students' writing through writing research papers. This research was conducted in qualitative. The results show that repetition becomes the highest occurrence in the students' writing as there are 240 occurrences (64%) in total types of lexical. Nevertheless, the least kind of lexical cohesion is hyponymy. There are only 20 occurrences (6, 6%). It can be seen that the meaning relation in the text occurs among the six types of lexical cohesion to make cohesive text. Besides that, the context of the text itself also refers to coherent text. It means that the text should consist of interrelated sentences to achieve good unity. Both are related to each other in creating well-structured text. The students were sometimes difficult to connect one word with other words. There might be a reluctance of translating the classification of the real words of EFL. Pedagogically, the students need to get studying vocabularies professionally to upgrade the stage of English into an advanced level especially in teaching English writing ability. It was recommended to teachers or lecturers to take an in-depth look at the EFL learners' problems in writing English more than and the English lecturers practice the prompt way to master vocabulary as the core of enhancing the writing quality