Academic language-related challenges, self-reported proficiency, and academic success at an EMI university in Brunei

ABSTRACT

This article reports an empirical study that investigates academic language challenges faced by university students in an Outer Circle context with almost four decades of English-medium instruction (EMI) education . The study also examines the relationship between students’ reported language challenges and their perceived academic success in EMI courses, as well as their self-rated proficiency in English. Quantitative analyses on questionnaire data collected from 198 undergraduate students indicate that Bruneian students did not generally experience major language-related challenges in their EMI courses, although academic writing and speaking were at times problematic. Furthermore, language challenges were found to be significant predictors of students’ perceived academic success in EMI but their self-rated English proficiency was not, suggesting that students’ beliefs about their language abilities and competence were not applied to the academic context. Finally, some implications in relation to early exposure to EMI education, and enhancing the provision of language support through English for academic purposes courses, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• English-medium instruction
• challenges
• higher education
• English language proficiency
• bilingual education

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my colleague Hanif Abdul Rahman for assisting mr with statistical data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Represents the slope of the line between the predictor variable and the dependent variable.

2. Rrepresents the standard error (standard deviation for a mean) for the unstandardised β.

3. Represents a fixed value that is not a variable.