The effect of language proficiency on approaches to learning and satisfaction of undergraduate accounting students

ABSTRACT

Employing the approaches to learning theoretical framework, this study examines the effects of language proficiency on overall student satisfaction with a unit of study mediated by approaches to learning accounting. Survey data was gathered from undergraduate second year accounting students from an Australian and an Ethiopian universities using the Biggs, Kember, and Leung [(2001). The revised two-factor study process questionnaire: R-SPQ-2F. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 71(1), 133–149] Revised Two-Factor Study Process Questionnaire. Language proficiency of the students was measured using English language background as a proxy. The results confirm previous studies that students who have relatively high (low) English language proficiency are likely to adopt a deep (surface) approach to learning compared to their counterparts; and also that high (low) language proficiency is associated with more (less) overall satisfaction with a unit of study. In some cases, a surface approach might be linked to greater student satisfaction when the level of the language proficiency is low although this is not a desirable outcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Accounting education
• approaches to learning
• English language proficiency
• revised two-factor SPQ
• student satisfaction

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for RMIT Accounting Educators’ Conference (AEC) 2016 for their valuable comments. We are also very grateful to Professor Alemayehu Molla and Mr John Donald for their reviews and comments on the early version of the paper. We thank the RMIT AEC 2016 conference participants and the Australian University, Department of Accounting seminar series participants for their feedbacks. We are indebted to all the students who completed the questionnaire and the respective department heads at the Ethiopian and Australian universities for their cooperation. Finally, we are grateful to the Australian University for funding the data collection for the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 QILT stands for Quality Indicators Learning and Teaching.

2 The survey data are made up of three suites of survey: Student Experience; Graduate Satisfaction; and Graduate Employment. The Student Experience has six components: Overall quality of educational experience, Teaching quality, Learner engagement, Learning resources, Student support, Skills development.

3 We adopt Ballantyne and Rivera’s (2014, p. 1) working definition of languages: mother tongue refers to the student’s first language or home language; second language learner refers to students whose mother tongue does not match the language of instruction; and language of instruction refers to the language in which classroom instruction is delivered.

4 In some regions of the country, English is used as a medium of instruction from grade 7 or grade 8 (Eshetie, 2013).

5 The subjects are referred to as ‘units’ at the Australian university and ‘courses’ at the Ethiopian university. The Ethiopian university accounting program consists of a total of 39 courses or 113 credit hours completed in 3-year full-time study out of which 14 (44 credit hours or 38.94%) courses are accounting and the remaining are finance, law, entrepreneurship and other business courses. The Australian university program consists of a total of 24 units or 24 credit hours completed in 3-year full-time study of which 7 (7 credits or 29.17%) units are accounting and the remaining are finance, law and other business units.

6 Second year subjects were chosen following Eley (1992) on the assumption that the students have established learning approaches. Further, in both universities, the structures of the two subjects are very similar in that both are delivered through combinations of traditional lecture and tutorial classes.

7 In all cases, two digits coding are used. The first digit referring to the university, that is, 1 for the Ethiopian university and 2 for the Australian university.

8 We did specifically ask the Australian group in the survey whether English was a medium of instruction at high school.

9 PLS-SEM (Partial least squares-Structure equation modelling) which is a second-generation of multivariate data analysis was chosen because it also allows to visually examine the relationships between constructs in the structure model (the theoretically formulated relationship among latent (unobservable) variables within the model) and also enable to easily assess the relationships between the observable indicator variables (referred to as the outer model) and the unobservable latent variables (constructs) (referred to as the inner model).