Applied Linguistics Review 2013; 4(1): 173 – 193
DOI 10.1515/applirev-2013-0008
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Michael H Daller and David Phelan
Predicting international student study success Abstract: More and more students study outside their own countries and by 2020 a rise to 7 million international students is predicted world-wide. The present study investigates the level of language proficiency that is necessary for international students to study successfully at universities in English-speaking countries and how this proficiency can be measured. Standardized tests such as the International English Language Test System (IELTS) or the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) are carefully developed and constantly scrutinized by the research community, and they provide a valid cut-off point for entry to university, but they do not seem to be good predictors of study success on their own. This is mainly due to the fact that most students who enter universities with these tests have similar scores which leave researchers with a truncated sample where correlations between these test scores and study success, e.g. marks obtained after one year, are necessarily low. The present study investigates alternative measures of language proficiency that can predict the study success of international students. In a longitudinal study with 74 international students a battery of language tests was used at the beginning of the academic year to predict the average marks that the students obtained at the end of the academic year. Several multiple regressions show that between 33% and 96% of the marks can be predicted with tests based mainly on vocabulary knowledge. The findings of the present study have implications for decisions on admission criteria and for language support provision in addition to subject specific learning. There may be many factors other than language proficiency that influence study success of international students such as cultural factors, motivation and familiarity with the subject area. However, our findings indicate that language proficiency and especially vocabulary knowledge is the key factor that explains in some cases almost entirely the final marks that the students achieve.
33 Keywords: International students, study success, vocabulary knowledge, univer34 sity entrance tests, IELTS, TOEFL, C-test 35 36 37 Michael H Daller: Swansea University, UK. E-mail:
[email protected] 38 David Phelan: University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. E-mail:
[email protected] 39 40
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We changed section nos. from here. Please check references in text.
1 Introduction and key questions1
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An increasing number of international students are studying outside their own countries and investigations into the relationship between foreign language proficiency and study success are therefore highly relevant for both the students and the host institutions. The latest available figures for international students worldwide show that in 2009 3.7 million tertiary students were enrolled outside their home country with more than 50% of international students coming from Asia (OECD 2011 URL, indicator C3). For 2020 a rise of international students worldwide to 7 million is predicted (Altbach, Reisberg and Lumbley 2009: vii). In 2010– 11 there were in a total of 428,225 international students in UK Higher Education alone. This is 6% more than the previous year (UKCISA: URL). World-wide the country of destination is in many cases English speaking. In 2009 18% of all international students went to the US, 9.9% to the UK, 7% to Australia, 5.2%2 to Canada, 1.9% to New Zealand, which is in total 42 % of all international students (OECD 2011 URL, Chart C3.2). In addition there are an increasing number of universities outside the English speaking world that offer programmes with English as the language of instruction (Wächter and Maiworm 2008). This means that increasing numbers of students study in a language other than their first language and in many cases the language of instruction is English. The major questions that have to be answered are what level of proficiency is necessary for successful study in English? And how can this proficiency be measured? This article aims to answer these questions.
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2 Predicting study success
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Predicting study success of international students has been of interest for researchers for many years. Graham (1987) summarizes a number of older studies going back as far as 1966 and comes to the conclusion that the review “of the studies of the relationship between English proficiency and academic success does not reveal clear-cut answers for the ESL professional” (1987: 513). The picture does not seem to have changed since then. Fiocco (1992) found in a study of 61 international students a correlation of only .063 between overall IELTS scores and
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38 1 We would like to thank the reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. 2 There are no figures available about the distribution of international students in Canada in 39 40 English-speaking and French-speaking universities.
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Predicting international student study success
1 academic results. This would explain less than 1% of the study results3. In a study
2 of 32 international students on education courses in Melbourne, Elder (1993) 3 found that IELTS scores could predict 12% of the study success in the first semes-
4 ter, whereas in the second semester the correlation was not significant. One study
5 of 38 international students in New Zealand yielded a relatively high correlation 6 (r = .52) between IELTS scores and Grade Point Averages (GPA)4 as a measure of 7 academic success (Bellingham 1993, 1995). The author argues that the correlation
8 in his study is much higher than in the study by Fiocco because the range of IELTS
9 scores was much broader in his study. According to Bellingham (1993: 231) IELTS
10 was relatively unknown at the time in New Zealand and therefore students with
11 low scores were accepted on the course, some students even had scores below 5.0 12 (mean IELTS score: 5.25, Standard deviation: 1.05). A further study that found
13 positive correlations between IELTS scores and academic success is Ferguson and
14 White (1993). They found a correlation of .39 between the IELTS scores of 28 Mas15 ters students in the faculty of science and their final percentages in their subject
16 areas in the faculty of science. The IELTS scores predicted 16% of the final marks.
17 Cotton and Conrow (1998), in a one year longitudinal study with 26 students, 18 found no significant correlation between the overall IELTS scores and study
19 success as measured in GPA. However, they did find correlations between staff 20 ratings of students’ achievement and the IELTS subtest for reading (r = .36) and 21 writing (r = .34). This would explain less than 12% of the staff ratings. Hill, Storch
22 and Lynch (1999) found in a study of 35 international students a significant cor-
23 relation between IELTS scores and GPA which predicted 29 % of the GPA on the 24 basis of the IELTS scores. Kerstjens and Nery (2000) investigated the relationship 25 between IELTS scores at entry and GPA of 113 students of Technical and Further 26 Education (TAFE) and Higher education. For the whole group a significant corre27 lation was found between IELTS reading (r = .262) and writing (r = .204) but not 28 for the other subtests nor for the overall IELTS scores. This means that a maxi-
29 mum of 6.8 % of the GPA can be explained by the IELTS reading scores despite the 30 fact that there was a wide range of scores (3.5–7.5 for the overall IELTS score in this
31 study). Huong (2001) analysed the predictive value of IELTS for study success of
32 202 international students in Australia. The IELTS scores predicted 12% of the 33 34
35 3 The value of the correlation coefficient has to be squared to yield the explained variance in the 36 dependent variable. 4 We agree with one of the anonymous reviewers that GPA is not the only possible measure of 37 study success. Other measures, such as satisfaction with the study or enhanced employability 38 are equally relevant. We welcome these comments and a variety of measures of study success 39 should be included in future research. In the present study we restrict ourselves to GPA in line 40 with most other studies of study success of international students.
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GPA in the first semester and 10% in the second semester. Feast (2002) carried out a study with 101 international students with overall IELTS scores ranging from 4.5 to 8.5 and a large variability in average GPA scores (between 1.5 and 7). The regression coefficient for IELTS in this study is +.39 which means that for every increase of one unit in IELTS there is a GPA increase of .39. Although it is not possible to compute the explained variance from these data, it would need about 3 bands difference in IELTS score (e.g. IELTS 8 versus 5) to predict one unit increase in GPA. The author therefore states that although the relation between IELTS scores and GPA is significant, the predictive value of IELTS is “relatively weak” (Feast 2002: 78). Dooye and Oliver (2002) found in a study with 89 participants significant correlations between IELTS reading scores and GPA (up to r = .34) but not between the other subtests and GPA or the overall IELTS score. Dooye and Oliver come to the conclusion that there is “little evidence for the validity of IELTS as a predictor of academic success” (2002: 36). Even the significant correlation of the reading sub-test would only account for less than 12% of GPA. Woodrow (2006) found significant correlations between the IELTS scores of 82 international students at postgraduate level. The explained variance ranged from 16% for the overall IELTS score to up to 22% for the listening subtest as the best predictor. Her sample had an unusually wide range from 5.5 to 8.5 overall IELTS scores. However, Ingram and Bayliss (2007) found “no apparent correlation between IELTS scores and student performance in course-related tasks” (p. 137) in a study with 28 students in Melbourne. The range of the IELTS scores was from 5.5 to 7.0. More recently, Yen and Kuzma (2009) investigated the relationship between the IELTS scores of 61 Chinese undergraduate business students and their academic performance. They found significant correlations between the IELTS scores and GPA for semester one (r = .46) and semester 2 (r = .25) indicating that the relevance of language proficiency is especially important at the beginning of the students’ studies and the predictive validity of IELTS is therefore lower for marks in later semesters. However, Lloyd-Jones, Neame and Medaney (2011) show that students who were “at risk” because of low language scores at entry of their study “remained so throughout their degree study” (2011: 175). These findings are based on data from 25 international Master’s students. Although the present study has a focus on IELTS it is also worthwhile looking at other tests for international students, and in particular the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) which is widely used in North America. Light, Ming and Mossop (1987) investigate the relationship between TOEFL scores and GPA of 376 international students at an American university. They found a very small significant correlation (r = .14, p
