AN APPRAISAL OF THE PERFORMANCE OF COMPUTER GRAMMAR CHECKE

Abstract

This study titled “An Appraisal of the Performance of Computer
Grammar Checker” selected one hundred and twenty computer
written essays. The study adopted quality approach; as such the
written essays were taken as the primary data. The secondary data
was collected from electronic and physical libraries by reading books
and academic journals. The population of the study was one
hundred and twenty students out of which seventy were taken as a
sample and analysed by the researcher. This is the sampling
technique adopted from Morgan and Crasie (1986) which allows
the study to reduce the size of the population when there is need to
do so. The subjects of the research were all senior secondary
students with ability to use the computer to write essays in the
school computer laboratory. All were instructed to write essays
(each) on any desired topics in a period of one hour. Then the basic
assumption was that all the grammatical errors should be
underlined with the colour green by the grammar-checker.
Conversely, all the computer written outputs contained some
grammatical errors that were not detected by the computer software
at the end of the study. This made the participants to feel
disappointed. In this respect, the study concluded that there were
still some grammatical errors that were not detected by the
computer grammar checker. Therefore it recommends that, writers
should pay attention to the grammatical rules in recommended text
books and dictionaries and not rely heavily on the computers to
produce clean written texts.