While some educators may argue that a pencil and paper test is not effective at measuring communicative competence, the TOEIC remains the international standard. In addition, a significant number of Japanese students will take the TOEIC at some point in their academic lives, and TOEIC scores are used as criteria worldwide by institutions, companies and governments. For these reasons, it has been chosen as a measure of both grammatical and communicative competence for the purposes of this study.