English language proficiency and academic performance: The role of institutional-based English language proficiency test in predicting students’ grade point average

The study also suggested that it is important to look at other individual differences as potential predictors of learners’ effectiveness, namely personality, cognitive ability, or learning orientations.

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c ngo i ng xu th h i nh p Tháng 11/2014 NĂNG LỰC TIẾNG ANH VÀ KẾT QUẢ HỌC TẬP ĐẠI HỌC: VAI TRÒ CỦA BÀI KIỂM TRA NĂNG LỰC TIẾNG ANH TRONG VIỆC DỰ ĐỐN ĐIỂM TRUNG BÌNH HỌC TẬP CỦA SINH VIÊN Hồng Gia Th
, Nguy n Ti n Dũng, Bùi Lê Minh* Trường Đại học Hà Nội *Tác giả liên hệ, email: thuhg@hanu.edu.vn Tóm t t: Nghiên cứu điều tra mối liên hệ Abstract: The current study investigated the lực tiếng Anh kết học tập sinh relationship between the English language proficiency viên chuyên ngành Quản trị Kinh doanh, Quản trị (ELP) and academic success of students majoring in Du lịch, Tài – Ngân hàng Kế tốn business trường đại học cơng lập Tại tiếng Anh sử Tourism Management, Finance and Banking, and dụng làm phương tiện giảng dạy kiểm tra – ñánh giá Accounting) at a state university where English is the Kết nghiên cứu cho thấy lực tiếng Anh medium of instruction and assessment The findings báo ñáng tin cậy khả thành công học suggested that ELP is a strong indicator of students’ tập sinh viên mơn học trình độ khác nhau, achievement across subject areas and course levels, trình độ tiếng Anh yếu, ñặc biệt kỹ Đọc and insufficient proficiency in English, particularly in hiểu Nghe hiểu khiến kết học tập bị hạn chế reading and listening skills, would result in limited Dựa kết thu ñược, nghiên cứu ñề xuất số academic success Based on the findings, a number of giải pháp nhằm cải tiến việc thiết kế triển khai recommendations were put forward in an attempt to chương trình giảng dạy phương pháp kiểm help improve the curriculum design and implementation tra – ñánh giá ñể nâng cao trình độ tiếng Anh sinh as well as assessments for better English language viên Nghiên cứu ñề cập ñến việc tìm hiểu proficiency The study also suggested that it is khác biệt cá nhân sinh viên important to look at other individual differences as báo khả học tập sinh viên như: tính cách, potential predictors of learners’ effectiveness, namely khả nhận thức ñịnh hướng học tập personality, cognitive ability, or learning orientations studies (i.e., Business Administration, ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONAL-BASED ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY TEST IN PREDICTING STUDENTS’ GRADE POINT AVERAGE Students whose first language is not English encounter grave challenges in their academic study when English is the language of instruction of the program Various studies have linked students’ English language proficiency (ELP) with important academic [e.g., Grade Point Average (GPA), non-completion rate] and individual (e.g., sociocultural adjustment and well-beings) outcomes(Chen & Sun, 2006; Cho & Bridgeman, 2012; Cumming, 1994; Graham, 1987; Johnson, 1988; Johnson & Buck, 1995; Pantages & Creedon, 1978; Sarudin, 1994; Zhang & Goodson, 2011).Generally, the current body of research suggested that better ELP leads to better GPA, completion rates, and sociocultural adjustment Review of the literature, however, suggests that most of the studies examining the relationship between ELP and academic success were conducted in English-speaking countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and New Zealand with samples from nonspeaking countries in Asia, the Middle East, and 347 Ti u ban 2: Đào t o chuyên ngành b ng ngo i ng Eastern Europe (e.g., Chen & Sun, 2006) This raises the question of whether such findings can be generalized to similar programs (i.e., programs where English is chosen as the language of instruction and assessment) delivered locally in non-English-speaking countries The differences in the academic and social environment (e.g., instructors’ and peers’ level of English, learning facilities and support, and opportunities for language practices outside the classroom) may moderate the relationship between ELP and academic success reported in the literature For that reason, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between ELP and students’ academic performance in a non-Englishspeaking country More specifically, we studied the relationship between students’ ELP, measured by (a) their performance on an institutional-based ELP test and (b) students’ GPA of an intensive English as a Second Language (ESL) program, with their overall college GPA and GPAs of different course areas and levels In addition, we also explored the relative importance of English language skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, and speaking) to students’ overall GPA Finally, we looked at the relationship between students’ ELP and their GPAs across the course levels (i.e., 200-level, 300-level, and 400-level courses).The study is expected to contribute to the literature by extending the current research to programs in nonEnglish-speaking countries where the academic and social settings are different from those in the English-speaking countries In addition, by examining the two measures of ELP (i.e., IELTS score and GPA of an ESL program) and their relationship with students’ GPA, we further our understanding of the relative importance of standardized ELP tests versus ESL programs Academic Programs Delivered in English in Non-English Speaking Countries The last decade witnesses an increase in the popularity of international programs in nonEnglish-speaking countries such as China, Thailand, and Vietnam According to the recent 348 statistics published by the Vietnam International Education Department (VIED), there are currently412 international programs which are codelivered locally by 78 Vietnam educational institutions and over 200 international universities in 30 countries and territories (VIED, 2014) These programs are usually designed by foreign universities and delivered partly or entirely by domestic partners in the host countries Regardless of where these programs come from, English is usually chosen as the language of instruction and assessment In addition, over the last few decades, local universities in these developing countries have started to offer their own academic programs in English in an attempt to internationalize their academic programs and to meet the increasing demand of the public for graduates who are both well-versed in English and professionally qualified in their respective fields With the current trends of global cooperation in education, the increased mobility of the workforce, and the demand for tertiary education, it is expected that this kind of programs will continue to grow in the future We chose to investigate the relationship between the ELP and students’ academic success in a non-English-speaking country for several reasons First, internationalization is an important component of universities, especially in developed countries in the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand Altbach & Knight (2007) suggested that internationalization of higher education have expanded dramatically in the last two decades in volume, scope, and complexity and predicted that it would continue to be a central force in higher education around the world Because of this we expect to see an increase in international programs and other forms of training in developing countries around the world Second, despite the popularity of the topic, we found only a few published studies investigating the relationship between the ELP and the academic performance in non-English speaking countries such as the Netherlands (e.g., Vinke & Jochems, 1993), Somalia (e.g., Addow, Abubakar, & Abukar, Chi n l
c ngo i ng xu th h i nh p Tháng 11/2014 2013), Nigeria (Aina, Ogundele, & Olanipekun, 2013; Kakeye, 2014), India (e.g., Kumar, 2014), Iran (e.g., Maleki & Zangani, 2007); and Tanzania (Komba, Kafanabo, Njabili, & Kira, 2012; Wilson & Komba, 2012) A better understanding of the relationship between the two variables is extremely important to improving the quality of the English training and subsequently the performance of students in these academic programs Recent research focus has switched to a new but related area of inquiry Researchers have started to look at students’ ELP and how it influences students’ academic performance in non-English-speaking countries Several differences in the academic and social environments between English-speaking and nonEnglish-speaking countries qualify for the new research direction First, a majority of the instructors in these types of programs are nonEnglish Language Proficiency and Academic native English speakers themselves Research Performance suggested the limitations associated with the As indicated, the relationship between instructors’ ELP influence their students’ ability to students’ ELP and their academic success has understand the materials, which in turn exerts a been attracting a great deal of research attention negative impact on their academic performance In the past studies, ELP was usually measured by Second, the learning facilities and support (e.g., a standardized ELP test such as the Test of library, ESL training, and academic skills assistant English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL; e.g., Al- program) are much limited in those developing Musawi & Al-Ansari, 1999; Cho & Bridgeman, countries where these programs take place The 2012; Van Nelson, Nelson, & Malone, 2004) or shortage of these resources may adversely impact the International English Language Testing students’ learning and performance Finally, System (IELTS; Feast, 2002; Read & Hayes, 2003, students study in non-English-speaking countries Woodrow, 2012) In some studies (e.g., Komba et miss valuable opportunities to strengthen their al., 2012; Kong, Powers, Starr & Williams, 2012), ELP by using their English outside the classroom however, the authors utilized institutional-based In the following section, we shall review several ELP tests Students’ academic success was usually studies looking at the relationship between ELP measured by students’ GPA at the end of the term and academic performance in non-Englishor program, although other individual outcomes speaking countries such as sociocultural adjustment (e.g., Andrade, Fakeye (2014) examined the influence of 2006; Zhang & Goodson, 2011) and students’ Nigerian secondary school students’ ELP and their perceived academic difficulty (e.g., Xu, 1991) overall academic performance and found that the were also used as the criteria in several studies In ELP has a significant positive relationship with general, the empirical evidence suggests a students’ academic achievements in Mathematics, significant positive relationship between ELP and Biology and English In another study using a academic achievements (Fakeye, 2014) The Nigerian sample at the college level, Aina et al results have been able to be replicated in various (2013) investigated the relationship between educational levels from elementary to tertiary students’ ELP and their performance in science education (e.g., Fakeye, 2014; Kong et al., 2013; and technical courses The results suggested that Sawir, Marginson, Forbes-Mewett, Nyland, students with a better level of ELP were more &Ramia, 2012; Vinke & Jochems, 1993), across likely to perform better than their counterparts subject areas (e.g., Aina, Ogundele, & Olanipekun, Several studies in Tanzania school system also 2013; Salamonson, Everett, Koch, Andrew, found that the overall ELP or specific English &Davidson, 2007), and in various Englishlanguage skill (i.e., writing) are positively related speaking countries (e.g., the United States, the to students’ academic performance at the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada) secondary (Wilson & Komba, 2012) and tertiary 349 Ti u ban 2: Đào t o chuyên ngành b ng ngo i ng level (Komba et al., 2012) Similar findings have been replicated across subject areas such as arts (Wilson & Komba, 2012), management (Kumar, 2014; Stephen, Welman, & Jordaan, 2004),and engineering (Vinke & Jochems, 1993) and the empirical evidence so far suggested that the ELP is crucial for students’ academic success Notwithstanding, the investigation by Addow et al (2013) pointed out that the proficiency in English would not ensure success in academic performance and that the relationship between English language proficiency and academic achievements of the subjects studied remained weak The findings of this study are similar to those reported by Graham (1987), Hill, Storch, and Lynch (1999), or Wilson and Komba (2012) that the relationship between English language proficiency plays a role but not a major or dominant role in the students’ academic success in English Hypotheses Based on the current empirical evidence on the relationship between ELP and academic performance, we proposed the following hypotheses for the current study First of all, as reviewed, most of the studies to date suggest that students’ ELP plays a positive role in students’ academic success We therefore concur with the empirical evidence and predict: H1a: The English language proficiency, measured by students’ overall GPA of their firstyear ESL program, is positively related to the overall college GPA H1b: The English language proficiency, measured by institutional-based ELP test, is positively related to the overall college GPA In addition, because the format of the institutional-based ELP test used in this institution was similar to that of the IELTS, which mainly focuses on testing students’ linguistic knowledge rather that communicative competence and academic skills (Carroll, 1980), we predict that the institutional-based ELP test scores is not as effective as students’ overall GPA in their first350 year ESL program in predicting students’ academic achievement (i.e., overall GPA) Therefore, we predict: H1c: Students’ overall GPA of their firstyear ESL program is a better predictor of student overall GPA as compared to students’ performance on the ELP test With regard to the English language skills, there have been a number of studies investigating the relationship between language skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and academic performance A review by Bharuthram (2012; p 205) suggested that “reading is one of the most important tasks encountered by students”, especially students in tertiary education Empirical studies (e.g., Bohlman & Pretorius, 2002) have found a significant relationship between students’ reading ability and their academic performance Because the reading ability is central to the process of acquiring knowledge of students, we predict: H2: Among the four English language skills, reading is the strongest predictor of students’ overall GPA Many studies investigating the relationship between ELP and academic achievement used students’ first year GPA as the criterion of academic success Therefore, little is known about how well ELP predicts the students’ academic success in the subsequent years In order to examine the importance ELP and academic success over the years during college, we examine the relationship between ELP and academic performance across course levels Because, in general, the level of course difficulty increases as students advance to graduation, we predict: H3: The English language proficiency is more strongly positively related to students’ GPA in the higher course levels than those in the lower ones Finally, we expect ELP, which illustrate students’ verbal competences, is less important for courses that require more quantitative competences such as Accounting or Finance and Banking More specifically, we predict Chi n l
c ngo i ng xu th h i nh p H4: The English language proficiency is more strongly positively related to students’ GPA in Foundation courses, Business Administration, and Tourism Management, as compared to those in Accounting and Finance and Banking Method Participants Data providing information on the English proficiency and academic performance for the current study was obtained from the academic database of the students in the four undergraduate programs (i.e., Business Administration, Tourism Management, Finance and Banking, and Accounting) ata medium-sized public university in Hanoi These students graduated from the university from 2012 to 2014 The reason for us to choose these particular programs was that, except for several compulsory general courses , all of their courses are delivered in English Therefore, it is very important for the students to have a good level of English proficiency in order to well in these programs There were 747 students in the final sample including 183 (24.5%) students from the Business Administration program, 99 (13.3%) students from the Tourism Management program, 286 (38.3%) students from the Finance and Banking program, and 179 (23.9%) students from the Accounting program Of those, 364 (48.7%) students graduated in 2012, 227 (30.4%) students graduated in 2013, and 156 (20.9%) students graduated in 2014 The sample included 121 (16.2%) male and 626 (83.8%) female students The mean age for the total sample was 22.29 years (SD = 69) Procedure Tháng 11/2014 Approval from the university management was obtained to secure the access to the academic database of the students in the four programs Grade record and selected demographic information (i.e., major, gender, and age) of the students who graduated from the four programs in the last three years (2012-2014) was retrieved from the database by a university administrator who was not involved in the study to ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of the students whose grade records were used in the study No personal information which can be used to identify the students was obtained Measures Demographic Variables Students’ major, age, gender were obtained from the students’ academic record Research have shown that age and gender may influence academic performance (Abubakar & Oguguo, 2012) In addition, because the requirements for the students to be admitted to the university are different for different majors in different cohorts, we, therefore, wished to ensure the control of the majors and cohorts in the statistical analyses English Proficiency All the students in the programs were required to go through an intensive English training program in their freshman year The training consists of 900 contact hours, organized into three 10 week quarters from September to June every year We obtained students’ English grades for each quarter which includes the general average point (GPA) for English and four of its language skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening, and speaking).From these individual grades, we derived the first year English GPA as well as grades for each of the four language skills Students’ grades range from to 10 In addition, we obtained students’ Vietnamese universities are required to offer selected compulsory courses in their academic programs as regulated by the framework established by the Ministry of Education and Training More specifically, in these particular programs, students are required to take courses in Vietnamese including General Philosophy, Political Economics, Scientific Socialism, History of Vietnam Communist Party, Ho Chi Minh’s Thoughts All students are required to take a university entrance examination to be considered for admission into universities in Vietnam The minimum grades required for each major vary across majors and cohorts Students have to score and above for English GPA and four of its components to be qualified for the sophomore year 351 Ti u ban 2: Đào t o chuyên ngành b ng ngo i ng institutional-based ELP test scores which includes the overall band and four of its component (i.e., reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills) The students were required to take the institutional-based ELP test at the end of the third quarter and had to score or above for the overall band of to be qualified for the sophomore year Academic Performance We obtained students’ GPA at the end of the program as the main indicator of student academic performance In addition, we calculated the GPA for each subject area(i.e., Foundation, Management, Tourism and Hospitality, Finance and Banking, and Accounting courses) and course level (i.e., 200 level, 300 level, and 400 level)to explore the relationship between the English proficiency and academic performance of students in specific subject areas and course difficulties Results We collected the demographic variables (i.e., age, gender, cohort, and major) and used them as controlled variables for all analyses in the current study Means, standard deviations, and intercorrelations among study variables, except for major and cohort, are displayed in Table Among the demographic variables, age was negatively correlated with all grade variables, except for Tourism and Hospitality courses GPA Intercorrelations between age and different GPAs rangingd from -.18 to -.41 (p< 01) suggested that younger students were more likely to better academically, especially for English related competencies (rs ranged from -.22 to -.41) Gender was positively related to most of grades variables (rs ranged from 09 to 21), listening, speaking, institutional-based ELP test score, and Finance and Banking GPAs, suggesting that female students were more likely to better in school as compared to male students Among English related grades, there were strong correlations between the four language competencies and the overall English GPA (rs ranged from 71 to 82; p< 01) while there were relatively weaker relationship observed between the four language competencies and institutional352 based ELP test score (rs ranged from 31 to 45; p< 01) The correlation between overall English GPA and institutional-based ELP test score was 49 (p< 01) suggested a moderately strong relationship among the two major indicators of English proficiency used in the current study However, their correlations with the overall college GPA (r = 75 for overall English GPA and r = 43 for institutional-based ELP test score) and other indicators of students’ academic performance (i.e., subject areas and course levels) were rather different, warranting further investigation of the relative importance of the two indicators in predicting students’ overall academic performance in later analyses Finally, we observed strong correlations among subject areas GPAs (rs ranged from 54 to 81; p< 01) and course levels GPAs (rs ranged from 62 to 84; p< 01) To further investigate the role English proficiency and students’ academic performance, an Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was conducted with the overall college GPA as the dependent variable, categorical demographical variables such as major, cohort, and gender as the fixed factors, and the overall English GPA, institutional-based ELP test score, and age as the covariates The results indicated that the main effects of overall English GPA, F(1, 715) = 510.26, p< 01, partial η2= 42 and institutionalbased ELP test score, F(1, 715) = 13.97, p