Chapter II

Review of Related Literature and Studies

This chapter presents the relevant literature and studies that the researchers considered in
strengthening the importance of the present study. It also presents the synthesis of the art to
fully understand the research for better comprehension of the study.

Writing proficiency includes all abilities and skills relevant to the expression of ideas via written
word. According to Goldburg (2013), writing proficiency is described as students who can pour
ideas, control emotions and attitudes, and behaviors when they complete or produce good and
appropriate writing that they expect.

However, for Sparks et al. (2014), writing proficiency is “the intersection of social, conceptual,
and linguistic processes in the writing process, providing a comprehensive view of what skilled
written communication involves, which can be used to obtain more complete evidence of
students’ proficiency with various aspects of writing”.

Writing is one of the important skills in English language acquistion. Without leaving aside the
importance of using active English to communicate, the passive one also plays important role to
convey the message. Writing, as a way to explore our passive English is not merely intended to
describe any topic without purposes. In this case, writing is a progressive activity.

Possessing writing skills is critical since this skill shows that performance in English writing is
relevant to the life of every student. As said by Domantay and Ramos (2018), writing skill is the
adequate ability of the students to compose words and form words into meaningful sentences,
and creates coherent paragraphs. For Liao (2016), writing skill helps students convey their
thoughts in fluent, correct, and coherent texts.

There are various issues facing by the students on writing and developing writing proficiency.
According to Jahin and Idrees (2012), despite being exposed to instruction for a long time at
different levels, university students shows very low levels of writing proficiency. In spite of the
time and effort they spend on trying to improve their writing skills, students cannot go beyond
the basics and have difficulty developing their language writing proficiency.

Sultan (2013) highlights the problem of poor writing skill in many secondary schools in the UK.
Sultan claims that the problem is ongoing for teachers, as well as students. Hence, he calls for
an urgent change of the educational policy and a recognition of the importance of academic
writing.
Morgana (2017) found that the language proficiency of Arab university students is not due to
the nature of the Arabic language, but to the methods of teaching the Arabic language.
Morgana adds that students’ language proficiency should not be measured in terms of stored
linguistic knowledge, but through the ability to produce, understand and distinguish the written
word in various communicative situations.

Ahmedou (2016) revealed that the writing skills of Arabic students in higher institutions are
very weak due to the inadequate vision of Arabic pedagogical instruction. He adds that they
produce incoherent written texts because they lack critical writing and thinking skills which
reflect their inability to convey their thoughts clearly.

However, in the examination conducted by Cabansag (2013) on written compositions of 140

high school students in one University in Cagayan Valley, Philippines, using a descriptive-
correlational approach. The findings reveals that the students have a high level of skill in
structure and grammar but a poor level of proficiency in mechanics. The most difficult to deal
with were verbs, verb tense, and capitalization.

From the primary school towards the university level, many students are noted in their speech
and writing as not being able to abide with the rules of subject-verb agreement. Errors on
subject-verb agreement were found not only in students’ essays but even in writings of
colleagues in universities. The more worrisome dimension of this problem is that such fiasco
extends even to professionals who use English in their lectures or those among the honorable
members of state and national assemblies or those engaged in varied media outfits.

According to Tafida & Okunade, (2016), errors in subject-verb agreement are becoming wide
spread and it seems as if many people are either no longer aware of the rules or they simply
undermine the importance of grammar rules, for as long as they are able to convey their
message.

Another errors made by the students in writing is misused of punctuations. Fati (2013)
investigated the relationship between writing proficiency and the type of errors made by
Moroccan students. The results indicated that students still did not use punctuation
adequately. There was a problem with the use of the question mark, the period and the comma
in both L1 and L2. Moreover, they did not know how to use a capital letter in L2 and ran into
difficulties with English grammar, especially the correct use of tense. They misspelled some
words due to the interference of their mother tongue. They also wrongly used the definite and
indefinite articles, used improper prepositions and chose inappropriate words.

For Bradshaw (2013), grammar is regarded as one of the fundamentals of language. Regardless
of any language, competence in grammar is foundational to one’s ability to communicate in a
particular language. One’s good grasp of grammar implies the ability to send clearer messages,
and the likelihood of being intelligible and understood by others. Moreover, one can also
produce good quality writings with a competent mastery of grammar.

According to Chung and Pullum (2015), grammar is defines as the way a language manipulates
and combines words in order to form longer units of meaning. There is a set of rules which
govern how units of meaning may be constructed in any language: one may say that a learner
who knows grammar is one who has mastered and can apply these rules to express him or
herself in the acceptability of the language forms.

There are various grammar checkers available to help students in their writing task. And one of
these is Grammarly. Grammarly is an AI-powered English GC that generates automatic feedback
by identifying errors in grammar, vocabulary, and language style. Known as the most accurate
grammar checker among various GCs. Grammarly has several merits as an English learning tool.
First of all, it provides real-time corrective feedback on roughly 500 kinds of grammatical errors
so that learners can immediately use it to improve their written work. Aside from corrective
feedback on grammatical errors, it also provides metalinguistic explanations of grammar errors,
which help learners resolve errors. Grammarly is also convenient to use to the extent that users
need only copy or paste their text into the input box or upload it in order to receive feedback.
The users can also choose from three versions of Grammarly available on both mobile and PC
platforms: free, premium, or business version. Although the two paid versions have advanced
features, Grammarly free version provide immediate corrective feedback on grammar, spelling
and punctuation at no cost once the users access it.

According to Ferster, et al., (2012); Wilson (2016); Wilson, & Andrada (2016), Automated
Writing Evaluation (AWE), one of the products of technology, brings an innovation in evaluating
writing. AWE is a computerized program which can evaluate and rate writing automatically
using online checking system. It uses an artificial intelligent developed by computational
linguistics to rate and to score the writing submitted to the program.

One of the program developed by AWE in the 21st century is Grammarly. Grammarly has been
claimed as an easy tool that can help students and academies on their writing by checking the
spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors and providing a comprehensive and useful feedback
including correction and suggestion to make the writing more readable, clear, precise, effective,
mistake-free, and impactful with a high rate of accuracy and evaluation speed.

Grammarly, which is an English automated written evaluation tool, is powered by artificial

intelligence (AI). It checks grammatical errors, writing tones, and duplicate content and
suggests synonyms for developing compositions coupled with many more features (Grammarly,
2021).
Nova (2018) asserted that Grammarly has two versions: the free version, providing general
features (e.g., grammar, spelling, and punctuation), and the premium version, providing more
complete features (e.g., duplicate-content detection and vocabulary suggestion). Also,
Grammarly free-version checks 150 error types. However, premium-version checks more than
400 error types.

Ghufron (2019) stated that Grammarly checker has a role in assessing English writing mistakes.
An elementary understanding of Grammarly's text work is to check the text's spelling and then
keep the tool's aim to keep typos out of context. It is an application that controls and maintains
writing production to look right. So there will be no errors, and also free plagiarism checks.
Concerning the idea above, Bailey & Lee (2020) also said that Grammarly checker software is
relevant in the English writing learning context as well as according to Lassoued et al., (2020).

Related Studies

Several studies have documented the problems and challenges presented by writing skills in
different contexts (Ahmed & Myhill, 2016; Al-Jarrah & Al-Ahmad, 2013; Bakry & Alsamadani,
2015; McMullen, 2009; Mohammad & Hazarika, 2016). While researching writing subskills, Al-
zuoud and Kabilan (2013) examined four types of spelling mistakes made by students in written
composition. The results indicate that most spelling errors made are substitution and omission
errors.

In a study conducted by Portillo-San Miguel (2021) in a Senior High School, 12 HumSS students
recorded lapses in grammar and unsuitable selection of lexis. Other errors include needless
tense shift, obscure reference of pronouns, sentences that are loose, fragments, and wordy, as
well as incorrect positioning of modifiers. This corroborates with Siddiqui’s (2015) notion that
students are low proficient in writing composition.

Castro (2012) also completed a study that identified the usual types of writing faults that most
students made in their written works. She found out that their waterloos are grammar,
punctuation, coherence, and cohesive devices, syntax, vocabulary, spelling, and organization.
With her belief that these writing weaknesses must be addressed, she developed activities.

In 2013, Pascua subjected 95 English 2 students to a writing activity and evaluated their
proficiency level as generally fair to poor. Their writing hitches are found in sentence
construction, grammatical forms, agreement, pronoun and its antecedent, sequencing,
coherence, vocabulary, capitalization, spelling, and mechanics.
A study conducted by Khasawneh (2013) found that poor spelling continues to be a major
weakness among Arabic language teachers. Their results showed that Arabic language student
teachers still face problems in spelling and need to practice and improve their performance
before they start to teach.

To support this idea, the results of the study conducted by Subhi and Yasin (2015), indicate a
high percentage of spelling errors in Iraqi students’ writing compositions, specifically omissions,
insertions, and wrong use of vowels in multi-syllabic words.

Moreover, Allan and Driscoll (2014) examined student written communication at Oakland
University, a doctoral-research institution in Detroit, Michigan with roughly 16,000
undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, scoring student writing artifacts from lower-level
English courses with a rubric. They were then able to identify relative points of strength and
weakness in student performance, gain perspectives regarding student perceptions of their
own abilities, and provide faculty development opportunities. They concluded that written
reflections could be used alongside other in class assignments to triangulate assessment and
provide a better picture of student learning.

Since Grammarly is one of the tool that the researchers will used to measure the students
writing proficiency, there are various studies helps to strengthen the importance of the
presents study.