Grammatical and Lexical Errors in Korean College Students’ Writing at a Low Level of Proficiency

This paper examines grammatical and lexical errors in English writing committed by Korean college-level learners at a low level of proficiency. Previous studies have shown that errors were primarily in punctuation, tense and articles. My qualitative analysis on a larger sample size of 100 argumentative essays written by college students at a low level of proficiency presents other types of major errors. The most frequent error types were found on misuse of nouns, subject-verb agreement, ill-formed sentence structure, and incorrect tense. Fewest errors were found in the placement of adjectives and adverbs in sentences. High-frequency negative influences of L1 on L2 writing were observed in the form of a paucity of articles and prepositions. Unnecessary words and wrong verbs frequently appeared in context. Mechanical problems like ill-formed paragraphs and sentence fragments are also identified. Some noticeable characteristics in lexical usage were revealed: Korean students use pronouns often exceedingly and the article the is infrequently used. Among auxiliary verbs, will and can were preferred over may and could. The adjective hard was used in the Korean college students’ writing three times more often than in native speakers’ corpus. Moreover, Korean college students preferred maybe over perhaps, which has a higher frequency in native speakers’ academic writing.