Effects of Language Proficiency on Error Patterns of Korean EFL University Students’ Writing

This study examines Korean EFL university students’ error types in English writing depending on their language proficiency. To this end, 152 university students’ English essays were analyzed. The findings revealed that the participants’ English proficiency played a considerable role in the frequency of errors. However, there was not a substantial difference in terms of each error type among different proficiency groups. Specifically, the advanced group made the least number of errors (13.4 errors on average) followed by the intermediate group (15.4 errors on average). The lower group made errors most frequently (17.36 errors on average). The findings also revealed that the participants dominantly made morphological errors in nouns followed by syntactic errors. Lexical errors were third most frequently committed errors. The number of the other major error types (morphological errors in verbs, mechanical errors, and miscellaneous errors) was far fewer than the three most frequently committed errors. Furthermore, with regard to the each error type, the findings showed that errors of articles/determiners were most frequently made by the advanced group. However, both the intermediate and the lower groups made errors on sentence structure most frequently. In addition, there was not a substantial difference among groups in terms of the least frequently made error types.