The purposes of this paper are to report the English proficiency of Korean university students through TOEIC test, and to suggest feasible ways to improve their communicative competence. A total of one thousand and forty-two sophomore students who took the Practical English course participated in this study. The data based on TOEIC scores were analyzed and the major findings revealed that: (1) Although students had slightly higher scores on the written language sections than on the spoken language parts, they had the lowest scores in the grammar section; (2) The total listening comprehension scores were significantly correlated with the total reading scores; (3) There was a high positive correlation between students’ proficiency level and their scores; (4) Multiple regression analysis showed that part 3 (short conversations) influenced significantly on the total listening part, while part 6 (grammar) had a significant effect on the total reading part. In conclusion, these findings contribute to the emerging picture of what constitutes a successful language learner by proposing a more refined model based on Willis’. In conclusion, the results of this study offer several suggestions for language teaching professionals as providers of effective instruction of communication strategies for enhancing the development of communicative competence.

This study primarily aims at identifying and classifying the most frequently occurring error types in Korean university students’ written work. This study will also try to find some ways to prevent those errors by discussing the issue of error treatment. A total of one hundred and fifteen Korean university students participated for two consecutive studies. The writing samples were collected and errors were extracted from native speaker teachers’ error correction of student writing. After the errors were identified, they were analyzed based on a modified linguistic category taxonomy (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen, 1982). In this study, the most common errors were ‘Noun Phrase’ errors, followed by ‘Verb Phrase’ errors. This possibly suggests the existence of interlanguage and implies that the differences in the two language systems or the absence of certain features in L1 (Korean) caused difficulty in their application in L2 (English) in using the correct forms. Pedagogical implications based on the findings are then discussed.