Abstract
The absence of language admission thresholds in many English medium instruction (EMI) university programmes has led to marked heterogeneity in students’ English proficiency upon entry. These students may face diverse challenges when listening to academic lectures, adopt different strategies to cope, and undergo varying trajectories in listening over time. To unpack such complexities, this study adopts a longitudinal mixed-methods design, comprising questionnaire responses from 412 freshmen and semi-structured interviews with 34 students at the beginning, halfway, and end of their first semester studying at an EMI university in China. Students were divided into high, medium, and low proficiency cohorts based on their listening placement test scores. Multilevel modelling analyses highlight that students entering with lower proficiency reported sharper reductions in listening challenges over time. Interview findings also reveal that these students engaged in more industrious self-regulated listening practice outside of the classroom than their highly proficient peers. Regardless of disparities in students’ proficiency, all students developed a higher tolerance towards ‘non-native’ teacher accents and shifted attitudes towards handling disciplinary terminology. The findings offer pedagogical implications for supporting different groups of students’ needs for successful transitions into English-medium tertiary education.
Funding source: Direct Grant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Award Identifier / Grant number: 4058098
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Research funding: This work is supported by the Direct Grant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (4058109).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Tribal Epistemologies and the discursive construction of COVID-19 knowledge; Guest Editor: Rodney H. Jones
- Disciplinary tribes and the discourse of mainstream media expert opinion articles: evidencing COVID-19 knowledge claims for a public audience
- Ways of seeing and discourse strategies of naming the novel coronavirus in the US and Hong Kong
- Who is our friend and who is our enemy? The enregisterment of tribalising digital discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic
- “By the way I want to give you some masks”: exploring multimodal stance-taking in YouTube videos
- Affective geographies and tribal epistemologies: studying abroad during COVID-19
- Editorial
- Tribal epistemologies and the discursive construction of COVID-19 knowledge
- Special Issue: Against Epistemological Theft and Appropriation; Guest Editors: Othman Z. Barnawi and Hamza R’boul
- The myopic focus on decoloniality in applied linguistics and English language education: citations and stolen subjectivities
- The bidirectionality of epistemological theft and appropriation: contrastive rhetoric in China
- Attempts at including, mediating and creating ‘new’ knowledges: problematising appropriation in intercultural communication education and research
- Epistemological theft and appropriation in qualitative inquiry in applied linguistics: lessons from Halaqa
- Can the subaltern speak in autoethnography?: knowledging through dialogic and retro/intro/pro-spective reflection to stand against epistemic violence
- The violence of literature review and the imperative to ask new questions
- Editorial
- Against epistemological theft and appropriation in applied linguistics research
- Special Issue: Art as social practice: language and marginality; Guest Editors: Roberta Piazza, Birgul Yilmaz and Charlotte Taylor
- ‘Art as social practice: language and marginality’: Special Issue of Applied Linguistics Review
- Objects are not just a thing – (re)negotiating identity through using material objects within the Kurdish diaspora in the UK
- “I am surprised they have allowed you in here to do this”: women’s prison writing as heterotopic space of narrative inclusion
- Walking with: understandings and negotiations of the mundane in research
- Translanguaging art – Questioning boundaries in Monika Szydłowska’s Do you miss your country?
- Reinventing the self through participatory art: writing and performing among rough sleepers
- Research Articles
- Expectation-practice discrepancies: a transcultural exploration of Chinese students’ oral discourse socialization in German academia
- Perceived teacher feedback practices, student feedback motivation and engagement in English learning: a survey of Chinese university students
- Incidental vocabulary learning from listening, reading, and viewing captioned videos: frequency and prior vocabulary knowledge
- A longitudinal study on lecture listening difficulties and self-regulated learning strategies across different proficiency levels in EMI higher education
- Secondary students’ L2 writing motivation and engagement: the impact of teachers’ instructional approaches and feedback practices
- Marked on the voice: the visibility experiences of Russian heritage migrants following the war against Ukraine