Do NESB University Students with Poor English Skills Make Rapid Linguistic Gains in Mainstream Studies?

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the testing and retesting two years later of 147 first‐year medical students for English language proficiency (ELP). A group of 66 with low initial proficiency, all of non‐English‐speaking background (NESB), improved from an average language age of 14.3 years to 15.2 years over the period. A comparison group of 81, randomly drawn from those who were of adequate ELP, 48% of whom were NESB, were close to the test ceiling on both occasions with an age equivalence of 33 years. Generalisation to other courses and samples may be limited but this study did not indicate great linguistic gains associated with mainstream studies for those whose English was poor at the beginning of their course.