Assessing EFL Proficiency through Error Analysis among Tertiary Students in a University College in Oman

Oman education system is unique because students have to go through a Foundation programme in preparation for tertiary education studies. This programme aims at improving students’ inter alia linguistic proficiency so that they could cope with university studies. The present study reports linguistic proficiency among two groups of students who were exposed to two different Foundation programmes. These groups were given a proficiency test that measured their grammatical, vocabulary, and reading comprehension proficiencies in English language. The study adopted an error analysis approach in identifying areas where students were not proficient. That is, after the proficiency test was administered, it was analysed statistically to establish if there was any significant difference between the proficiency of two groups. The test was then subjected to error analysis to establish common areas where students had problems. The findings indicate that the group that went through the new foundation programme performed better than the other group. However, both groups had similar problems in grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension, ranging from progressive and perfect aspect, concord to word forms, collocations, and reading for specific and gist information. The study therefore recommends a support course that will help alleviate the persistent errors at post-foundation level.