A Longitudinal Study of Freshmen ELT Students’ Proficiency: A Case Study

With English being the most popularly taught and learnt foreign language nowadays, institutions such as the 5 private/state-trust universities in North Cyprus have adopted English medium education so as to fulfil both the societal and educational requisites. The English Language Teaching departments obviously take the lead and conduct their profession related courses via the English medium thus ensuring the continuous linguistic development of the students. Unfortunately, these courses have been transformed into language learning sessions for the students whose language competency at the end of their four-year undergraduate study continues to be debatable. This study encompasses two main purposes; firstly, to determine if the English language development of the EMU English Language Teaching Freshmen students is acceptably adequate, and secondly, to compare the English competency of 5 groups of students with regards to predefined social and economic parameters. The first part of the research is a longitudinal study involving continuous testing and assessment of students‟ language abilities both in English and in Turkish. The latter part assesses the students‟ language competency at a specific time instant. Data are collected via pre-test/post-test design by employing a recognised test battery, 2 writing tasks and a questionnaire. The data are analysed quantitatively with Paired-Sample T-test, Independent Samples T-test, Kruskal Wallis Test, Mann-Whitney U test, One-way Anova, Pearson Correlation and Linear Regression. The study concludes that students‟ English language skills are positively reinforced over a period of two semesters, with the departmental vocational and language courses progressively supporting the improvement of their language competence. The results also argue that there is no significant difference in students‟ language competency with respect to genders, and yet there is a significant correlation between students‟ language competency and their socio-economic-cultural background. Additionally, the study claims that there is a significant difference between students‟ L1, Turkish, and L2, English, competencies and there is hardly any correlation between their L1 and L2 writing skills. Finally, when all five universities are compared with respect to their students‟ language test results, a significant difference between and among the universities is observed. Keywords: Content Language Integrated Learning, Content Based Instruction, English medium education, immersion education, language interdependence, lingua franca