The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education

ISSN: 1838-2959
Volume 1, Number 1, pp. 55-64
July - 2010

Conceptualising the English language needs of first year university

students

Neil L. Murray
Learning and Teaching Unit
University of South Australia

Abstract

Australian universities are currently re-evaluating how they address the English
language needs of their students of non-English speaking backgrounds. This is, in part,
a response to ten Good Practice Principles that constitute the main thrust of a
government-commissioned document released in 2009 and designed to ensure that
standards of good practice are established and maintained throughout the sector in
respect of English language provision. This paper argues that any attempt to uphold
these principles and implement provision that is coherent, relevant and rigorous,
requires clarification of the concept of proficiency. To this end, a distinction is
proposed between proficiency, academic literacy and professional communication
skills, and consideration is given to the implications of this distinction in terms of (a)
responding to the language needs of both native speaker and non-native speaker
students, and (b) the post-enrolment language assessment of newly-enrolled students
with a view to identifying those at risk.

Please cite this article as:

Murray, N.L. (2010). Conceptualising the English language needs of first year university students.
The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 1(1), 55-64.

This article has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication in Int J FYHE. Please see the
Editorial Policies under the About section of the Journal for further information.

Copyright of articles is retained by author/s. As an open access journal, articles are free to use,
with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. ISSN: 1838-2959
 Conceptualising the English language needs of first year university students

Background

In recent years, the nature of Australian universities has changed quite fundamentally in
response to a variety of factors including: the globalisation of education; a growing migrant
population; financial imperatives resulting from changing funding models; government
initiatives to increase the flow-through of students from secondary to higher education; and
efforts, fuelled by the 2008 publication of the Bradley Report (Bradley, Noonan, Nugent &
Scales, 2008), to promote the widening participation agenda by opening up higher education
to a more socio-economically diverse spread of the population through means such as equity
or enabling programs.

These developments have had particular repercussions for students English language
competency. There is an increasingly widespread perception within higher education that the
language and literacy skills of students of both English speaking backgrounds (ESB) and
non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) is in a state of declinea situation which, some
would argue, has forced lecturers to tone down their course materials and spend time
addressing English language problems many regard as outside the scope of their expertise
and locus of responsibility (e.g. Abelson, 2005). This calls into question the quality and depth
of the knowledge base and English language competency with which these students exit their
programs of study, and thus of their employability and readiness to enter an Australian
workforce which, increasingly, is expected by employers to demonstrate strong language and
communication skills (Birrell & Healey, 2008; Burch, 2008) as well as technical competence
in their discipline areas.

Students who enter university lacking the English competency necessary to pursue their
studies effectively can suffer anxiety, frustration, de-motivation and an inability to engage
with the learning process. Professional courses that involve work placements, such as
education, pharmacy and nursing, can be particularly problematic and result in high levels of
student stress and even expulsion if they are unable to meet the communicative demands
involved. Similarly, instances of plagiarism can mean that some students end up facing
disciplinary boards and penalties they can often ill afford, despite the fact that such
plagiarism may be inadvertent, culturally driven and/or the result of a strategy to compensate
for inadequate language skills. Students facing these kinds of situations may ultimately opt to
withdraw from their studies, a decision which can carry with it the stigma of failure within
their families and/or cultures and thus represent a source of real trauma. Equally, those for
whom language competence is not an issue can and do become frustrated as they see their
own progress as being hampered by students who, they may feel, should not be enrolled in
degree programs if they do not have the language skills needed to cope and keep up. Such
feelings intensify when, as tends to happen, NESB students cluster together for course tasks
and activities or receive special attention in the form of credit-bearing English courses their
native-speaker peers sometimes perceive as soft options (Baik & Greig, 2009, p. 405). For
their part, lecturers can feel awkward and confounded by students who struggle with the
language, sometimes opting to ignore them and/or simply directing them to learning advisers
in the hope that they will be able to sort them out. Such reactions serve only to further
marginalise these already vulnerable individuals: it places them within a deficit frame,
lowers their sense of confidence, self-esteem and right to be there, and deprives them of the
kind of input and interaction that is vital to their educational and linguistic development.

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 Murray

The good practice principles

Against this background, a document was circulated to universities early in 2009 entitled
Good Practice Principles for English language proficiency for international students in
Australian universities (GPP) (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace
Relations [DEEWR], 2009). It was the product of a project undertaken by a Steering
Committee convened by the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) with the
purpose of enhancing the quality of English language provision at universities by having a
sector-wide mechanism for its monitoring and evaluation. The document reads:

The expectation of the project Steering Committee is that universities will consider the Principles
as they would consider other guidelines on good practice. As part of AUQA quality audits
universities can expect to be asked about the way they have addressed the Principles, just as they
are likely to be asked by AUQA auditors about their application of a range of other external
reference documents for the university sector. (DEEWR, 2009, p. 2)

The GPP document implicitly recognises the fact of burgeoning numbers of NESB students
entering higher education in Australia, the benefits they bring with them, and the moral
responsibility universities have to ensure that, having admitted them, these students are given
the support they need to succeed in their studies and fulfil their academic potential. In
responding to the document, Australian universities have been re-evaluating their English
language provision and, in particular, the mechanisms they have in place for screening
students pre-enrolment, methods for identifying newly enrolled students in need of language
support as early as possible post-enrolment, and determining the most effective way of
delivering support to those most at risk due to weak language skills. This paper proposes a
model for conceptualising English language provision post-enrolment and, in doing so, seeks
to demonstrate that any such conceptualisation has ramifications for the nature of post-
enrolment English language testing.

Conceptualising English language support: A tripartite division of competencies

The GPP document offers a useful blueprint for how universities can go about ensuring that
their English language provision is relevant and robust. It refers throughout to proficiency,
a rather nebulous, ill-defined concept that is used widely within the field of English language
teaching, and indeed testing. It defines proficiency as the ability of students to use the
English language to make and communicate meaning in spoken and written contexts while
completing their university studies (DEEWR, 2009, p. 1), and goes on to state:

Such uses may range from a simple task such as discussing work with fellow students, to complex
tasks such as writing an academic paper or delivering a speech to a professional audience. This
view of English language as the ability to organise language to carry out a variety of
communication tasks distinguishes the use of English language proficiency from a narrow focus
on language as a formal system concerned only with correct use of grammar and sentence
structure. (p. 1)

Unfortunately, this type of broad catchall definition of proficiency fails to capture

important distinctions, an articulation of which is helpful, if not critical, to the process of
conceptualising and, ultimately, implementing a model of English language provision for
newly-enrolled students. Specifically, unpacking the notion of proficiency reveals three
competences: English language proficiency, academic literacy and professional

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 Conceptualising the English language needs of first year university students

communication skills (Murray, in press). Although these competencies interact in various and
complex ways, and in theorising about and considering the pedagogies of one we inevitably
invoke the others, they can also be clearly differentiated.

English language proficiency

Proficiency can be defined as a language users control of the formal and functional
properties of language such that they are able to express and understand meaning accurately,
fluently, and appropriately according to context. Tuition in proficiency takes as its starting
point the notion of communicative competence, first coined and explicated by Hymes (1972)
and subsequently by othersmost notably Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983) and
Bachman (1990). Canale and Swains iteration is perhaps the one that has been most
commonly invoked in language teaching and it comprises four components: grammatical
competence (concerned with the well-formedness of language), sociolinguistic competence
(the ability to be appropriate with language), discourse competence (knowledge of the
connections between utterances in a text to form a meaningful whole), and strategic
competence (the ability to compensate for imperfect language knowledge). Proficiency
refers to a general competence in language and as such comprises a set of generic skills and
abilities captured in Canale and Swains framework and reflected in tuition that focuses on
areas including grammar and syntax, general listening skills, vocabulary development,
general reading and writing skills, the development of communication strategies and, an area
frequently ignored, the pragmatics of communication and associated concerns with
politeness, implicature and inference. Most importantly, students require opportunities to
develop fluency and the confidence to deploy their formal and functional knowledge of the
language in authentic contexts both within and outside the academic environment.

These generic skills and abilities represent an investment in language that can be cashed in
in any potential context of use. For first year undergraduate NESB students, they provide an
entre to engagement without which many will feel peripheral, isolated and unfulfilled. As
will become apparent, they are also prerequisites to developing academic literacy and
professional communication skills, and their importance to academic success is well
documented in the literature (Elder, 1993; Johnson, 1988; Light, Xu & Mossop, 1987; Tonkin
1995).

Academic literacy

Academic literacy has been defined as the capacity to undertake study and research, and to
communicate findings and knowledge, in a manner appropriate to the particular disciplinary
conventions and scholarly standards expected at university level (University of Western
Australia, 2005). This linking of academic literacy to disciplines highlights the fact that
academic literacy is pluralistic in nature (we can speak of academic literacies): not only are
there a number of sub-literacies of which academic literacy is comprised but each discipline
area has associated with it a particular set of literacy practices with which those involved in
the discipline need to become conversant and which effectively help define and differentiate
that discipline.

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This fundamental link with discipline distinguishes an academic literacies model from a study
skills approach which assumes that

literacy is a set of itemised skills which students have to learn and which are then transferable to
other contexts. The focus is on attempts to fix problems with student learning, which are treated
as a kind of pathology. The theory of language on which it is based emphasises surface features,
grammar and spelling. (Lea & Street 1998, p. 158)

The academic literacies model is less crude and insensitive and

sees the literacy demands of the curriculum as involving a variety of communicative practices,
including genres, fields and disciplines. From the student point of view a dominant feature of
academic literacy practices is the requirement to switch practices between one setting and another,
to deploy a repertoire of linguistic practices appropriate to each setting, and to handle the social
meanings and identities that each evoke. (p. 159)

These settings, or disciplines, are, as Rex and McEachen (1999) note, recognised not only
by specialised vocabularies, concepts and knowledges, but also by accepted and valued
patterns of meaning-making activity (genres, rhetorical structures, argument formulations,
narrative devices etc.) and ways of contesting meaning.

The study skills approach, then, takes a one-size-fits-all view of academic literacy, typically
dislocating its subject matter from particular disciplinary contexts. It is an approach
commonly adopted by English for academic purposes and pathway programs and widely
reinforced by published materials but which is out of kilter with the notion of academic
literacy as something that is intimately and fundamentally tied to a particular domain of
application.

With this notion of academic literacies (plural) in mind, it can be helpful to think about
items in the following sample list of areas of focus commonly adopted within the teaching
of English for academic purposes as parameters some of which will need setting in
accordance with the requirements of particular discipline areas and the literacies associated
with them.

Sourcing information (information literacy) Managing information

Active and effective reading Note-making
Analysis, critical reflection and evaluation Writing genres
Voice and identity in academic discourse Seminar skills
Plagiarism, referencing conventions and paraphrase Oral presentations
Designing, implementing and reporting research Study habits
Editing and proofreading Using data/statistics

While items such as editing and proof-reading and study habits lend themselves to more
generic presentation, others such as designing, implementing and reporting research,
referencing conventions, writing genres and using data/statistics do not.

Professional communication skills

Although at one level it is nonsensical to talk of academic literacy and language proficiency
without presupposing some degree of communication, there is another level at which

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 Conceptualising the English language needs of first year university students

professional communication skills can be regarded as something other than proficiency or

academic literacy. This becomes apparent when one considers that a native speaker of
English, fully proficient by definition and perhaps even with advanced academic literacy
skills, may not necessarily be a good communicator.

From the outset of their university careers, all students, ESB as well as NESB, need to
develop skills and strategies for communicating in an academic environment according to the
particular demands of their discipline as well as those of the profession into which they
eventually hope to enter. As we have seen, in those subjects that typically involve work
placements or practicums as part of degree programs, being able to communicate is essential
if students are to complete their placements successfully. Once admitted to the workplace,
graduates need to go on and demonstrate that they have communication skills that are
developed enough to ensure they can engage effectively in their respective professional
contexts.

Being an effective communicator involves a number of skills or competencies all of which

answer to Good Practice Principle 8, which recognises the importance of students being able
to adapt to their academic, social and linguistic environments (DEEWR, 2009, p. 10) as
well as their work environments. These include:

Intercultural competence - the ability to work well across cultures and to change ones
knowledge, attitudes and behaviours so as to better manage cultural difference and
unfamiliarity, inter-group dynamics, and the tensions and conflicts that can accompany this
process (Alptekin, 2002; Kramsch, 1993). Within the university context, intercultural
incompetence can result in students being unable to adapt and accommodate to those around
them and consequently facing significant challenges around such issues as independence,
autonomy and teamwork, conflict resolution and appropriate engagement in lectures and
tutorials. Later, in the workplace, such issues can extend to privacy and confidentiality,
sexual orientation, risk management, power relations, leadership, and lines of responsibility.

Good interpersonal skills - the ability to relate to and interact with others effectively and
harmoniously. This entails an appreciation of principles governing the negotiation of
relationshipsof politeness, face, turn-taking, accommodation, an awareness of self and
other, being an effective listener etc. (e.g. Adler, Rosenfeld & Proctor, 2001).

Conversancy in the discourses and behaviours associated with particular domains - the ability
to understand and use spoken and written language in a way appropriate to and for the
specific purposes associated with particular contexts of use; to take on different roles, assume
different behaviours, and interact effectively and appropriately according to those contexts.

Non-verbal communication skills - communication in the absence of words and including

an appreciation of eye contact, touch and personal space, gesture, tone of voice, body
movement, dress and posture (e.g. Hybels & Weaver, 2001).

Group skills and leadership skills - the ability to work as part of a team and, where
necessary, to lead others and demonstrate initiative (e.g. Baron, Kerr & Miller, 1996;
Lumsden & Lumsden 1997).

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Having identified and articulated three key and distinct competencies that underlie
proficiency, the question arises as to which first year university students require tuition in
which of the respective competency areas.

NESB students and ESB students: Who needs what?

With respect to English language proficiency, despite meeting the English language entry
criteria of their receiving institutions, many NESB students still struggle to cope with the
linguistic demands of their degree courses as a result of inadequate levels of proficiency, and
therefore require language support. While this raises important questions around the
suitability of gate-keeping tests such as International English Language Testing System
(IELTS) and Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), the validity of statements of
test equivalence, and the way in which those tests are used by institutions, are questions
beyond the scope of this paper. More relevant to current purposes is the fact that, while ESB
students are, by definition, fully proficient in English, it is nevertheless sometimes the case
that their language also requires attention for it can exhibit what are more accurately
described as dialectal forms not in keeping with academic and professional standards and
expectations. This fact suggests that, where necessary, this cohort should also have access to
support designed to help modify their language behaviour such that it conforms to those
standards and expectations. Whether for NESB or ESB students, such support might be
integrated into the curriculum via a credit-bearing course, and/or through the kind of extra-
curricula interventions typically offered by Learning and Teaching units and comprising
consultations, workshops and online materials.

Even where students have advanced English language proficiency, this does not equate to
having well developed academic literacystudents may be highly proficient users of English
but lack the academic literacies needed to perform well in their studies. Academic literacy is
something with which few students, domestic or international, ESB or NESB, enter
university adequately equipped. While some students will begin their degree programs having
already developed some knowledge of the literacies they will need, courtesy of their
secondary school education, levels of such knowledge tend to be highly variable and many
international students will bring with them practices from educational cultures not in tune
with the expectations of the Western academic tradition. The academic literacies they will
require for higher education need to be learned, therefore, and learned within the context of
their discipline area, embedded within the curriculum and presented as an integral part of
their undergraduate studies. In this way, disciplinary idiosyncrasies can be appropriately and
more effectively addressed and learning takes on greater immediacy, relevance and
authenticity for students, thereby helping ensure that input becomes intake (Curnow &
Liddicoat, 2008). Embedding academic literacy within the curriculum is, then, based on the
ideas that (a) all newly-enrolled students require tuition in academic literacy, for they come
with little or no prior knowledge of it and thus commence their studies on roughly equal
terms in this regard; and (b) the teaching of academic literacy should therefore form a normal
part of academics teaching responsibilities. For many institutions, this notion is likely to
represent a fairly radical departure from traditional perceptions and practices and will entail
some professional development of staff and the adoption of a new mindset. As more
universities require newly-appointed academics to undergo higher education teaching courses
as part of the probationary process, these would appear to offer a useful vehicle for raising

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 Conceptualising the English language needs of first year university students

awareness in new staff of the need to reflect on what academic literacy means for their
particular discipline and ways of mapping it onto the curriculum and teaching it.

As with academic literacy, there is also a strong argument for embedding communication
skills in the curriculum and presenting them within the context of students discipline areas so
as to help ensure that they are most relevant to their current and future disciplinary/
professional needs. The University of South Australia, along with a number of other
universities, is already embedding communication skills within course content as part of its
efforts to ensure that it is effectively implementing its Graduate Qualities framework and
developing students readiness for the workplace.

Proficiency as the focus of post-enrolment language assessment?

The argument is, then, that all studentsNESB and ESB, international and domesticshould
receive tuition in academic literacy and professional communication skills, and that such
tuition is best delivered strategically embedded within the curriculum. In addition, those
NESB students deemed to be at-risk due to weak English should be offered additional tuition
in proficiency, and their ESB counterparts tuition that focuses on modifying dialectal forms
that are at odds with academic and professional expectations.

It follows that the only sensible focus of post-enrolment language assessment is proficiency.
There is, after all, no point in testing students academic literacy and communication skills if
these are going to be taught as a matter of course to all students as an integral part of the
curriculum. There is currently considerable professional dialogue around the nature of post-
enrolment language assessment (e.g. Dunworth, 2009) and while it is an issue that warrants a
paper in itself given its technical and political complexities, it is perhaps worth emphasising
here that whether it takes the form of a test or an early piece of assessed coursework, any
assessment procedure needs to encompass not only NESB but also ESB students. While it
may be labelled as something other than proficiency and will, in part, require a different
treatment, the language weaknesses of this increasingly diverse cohort may equally
compromise their ability to fulfil their academic potential. As such, if they are to meet their
moral obligation, universities need to identify those at risk and intervene in a timely fashion
in order to ensure these students have every chance of success as students and graduates.

Conclusion

Factors such as the widening participation agenda and efforts to boost international student
enrolments have meant that universities are having to address major challenges around the
English language competence of students entering higher education, many of whom lack the
language skills they need to meet the demands of their degree courses and, subsequently,
those of the workplace. While this is by no means a new issue (e.g. Davies, 2008), the scale
of those challenges today is greater than ever and institutions are under unprecedented
pressure to respond and ensure they are meeting their duty of care to the students concerned.
Despite its failure to explicitly address the needs of ESB students, the GPP document has
certainly focused the collective mind of the sector in this regard and served as a catalyst in
promoting reflection and, ultimately, change, where necessary. If any such change process is
to be well informed and systematic, then its starting point needs to be a clear understanding
and articulation of the language and literacy skills NESB and ESB students respectively need

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to succeed in their studies and the means through which those skills might be imparted. This
paper has sought to provide one such articulation. While the model presented may face
institutional challenges around its conceptualisation and implementation, in its favour is the
fact that in a climate where universities are being required to up their game in respect of
English language provision and respond to a set of principles that are set to inform future
AUQA audits, there is greater likelihood that the necessary political will exists to ensure that
ideas for change get a hearing they might otherwise not.

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