A spell checker can be useful to correct typos, especially if you are like me — I look at the keyboard about 50% of the time when I type. In my mother tongue,

A spell checker can be useful to correct typos, especially if you are like me — I look at the keyboard about 50% of the time when I type. In my mother tongue, I have a perfect orthographical sense: I just need a glimpse of a word to know if the spelling is correct. As a result, proof-reading requires close to zero effort, and I do not use a spell checker for my mother tongue. I type a lot in English, and I have come to realize that I do not have this same orthographical sense. Particularly, there are a lot of transparent words between English and my mother tongue with just subtle differences in the spelling, which makes me likely to spell them wrong — e.g. replace "n" by "nn" or "e" by "ea". So I usually have a spell checker on when I type in English. Also, did you ask your students why they were shocked?