Exploring Indonesian EFL Students' Writing Engagement on the Tiktok Platform with the Support of Grammarly

Abstract

Writing engagement has become a central aspect of EFL writing instruction, particularly in technology-enhanced learning. Although previous studies have examined social media platforms and automated writing evaluation tools separately, little is known about how these technologies can be integrated to enhance both writing engagement and writing quality. TikTok was selected because its short instructional videos provide authentic language input and stimulate students’ ideas, whereas Grammarly offers automated feedback that supports revision and improves writing accuracy. This study investigated an integrated TikTok–Grammarly workflow in relation to writing engagement and paragraph-level writing quality among Indonesian EFL university students. Students accessed instructional TikTok videos to generate ideas and receive language input, drafted their paragraphs, used Grammarly to obtain automated feedback, revised their work, and submitted the final version for classroom discussion and reflection. A descriptive qualitative case study was conducted with 40 undergraduate students enrolled in an English writing course, with seven participants selected for in-depth interviews. Data were collected through writing artifacts, revision notes, interviews, and classroom observations. The findings showed that the integrated workflow enhanced behavioral engagement through repeated revision, cognitive engagement through critical evaluation of feedback, and affective engagement by reducing writing anxiety. Students also demonstrated improvements in grammatical accuracy, lexical choice, and referential cohesion, although conjunctive cohesion showed limited progress. These findings indicate that TikTok and Grammarly played complementary roles in fostering writing engagement and improving paragraph-level writing quality in EFL contexts.