Abstract

The study behind this paper aimed to assess the influence of the socioeconomic status (SES) on university students’ expectations of English use in their prospective career and their perceptions of English competence as a key professional skill. The sample consisted of 109 students from two Bachelor Degree courses at the University of Málaga (Spain), one in Energy Engineering and the other one in Pedagogy. An ANOVA analysis revealed that there was no statistically significant difference between the three SES groups in the sample as to their expectations and perceptions concerning English competence. However, descriptive statistics show that the participants in the lower SES group have lower expectations regarding the role of English in their future career. Additionally, the students in this group hold a lower perception of English as a key professional skill. These findings lead us to conclude that lower SES students may be less inclined to enrol in partially or fully taught English courses at university, and that their perceptions may actually be a factor in their future career prospects in areas where English is extensively used as a lingua franca.

Highlights

  • In the last decades, there has been a substantial increase of English-taught programmes and courses worldwide (Dearden, 2014; Macaro et al, 2018; Wächter & Mainworm, 2014)

  • The present paper aims to assess the influence of the socioeconomic status (SES) on university students’ expectations of English use in their prospective career and their perceptions of English competence as a key professional skill, in the conviction that these perceptions may influence the students’ choice of English-taught courses

  • The students in this group hold a lower perception of English as a key professional skill than the other two groups

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Summary

Introduction

There has been a substantial increase of English-taught programmes and courses worldwide (Dearden, 2014; Macaro et al, 2018; Wächter & Mainworm, 2014). Only 7% of the surveyed universities in the study conducted by O’Dowd (2018) were not holding any English Medium Instruction (EMI) courses at all. A typical definition of EMI is this: “English-Medium instruction is when non-language courses in for instance medicine, physics or political science are taught in English, to students for whom it is a foreign language. Internationalization policies in higher education institutions, the promotion of plurilingualism and mobility by European institutions, competitiveness among universities and the need to equip the students with competences that will increase their employability are among them (Barrios & López Gutiérrez, 2019). It is unquestionable that English is the lingua franca for science and that English competence is needed to access, generate and share updated scientific information

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