Overseas Students ' graduating with poor English'

The source: 澳洲留學顧問中心

Monday January 29, 10:20 AM

Universities faced tough questions about large numbers of foreign students graduating with English so poor they couldn't find work in their chosen profession, demographer Professor Bob Birrell HAS said.

Prof Birrell, author of a new study on the English language abilities of Australia's 239,000 foreign students, said those with poor English were capable of handling social situations but fell way short of the capacity to write at a professional level.

"It means we are graduating large numbers of people whose English is well short of the standard you would expect for a university graduate," he told ABC Radio.

"It means the universities have got to ask some serious questions about what they are producing.

"Universities ought to be insisting on at least modest English for people starting their courses, since it obviously makes a mockery of the training process if the students can't comprehend what their lecturers are telling them or have difficulty writing in good English when it comes to essay work.

"The findings do put some hard questions to the universities."

Prof Birrell said they also posed hard questions to authorities charged with attesting to graduates' English language abilities.

In his study, reported in Monday's Fairfax newspapers, Prof Birrell, director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Melbourne's Monash University, found more than a third of overseas students studying in Australia were completing their degrees with English so poor they should not have been admitted in the first place.

He found more than half of South Korean and Thai students could not meet required English levels.

Universities did not conduct their own tests of English language ability and relied on the Department of Immigration for issuing higher education visas.

Prof Birrell said the government required a test conducted overseas for those coming directly to Australia. But a third were entering universities without having passed that test.

"The government is assuming that the various pathway programs they do once they get there will bring their English up to standard. But these results indicate that is not the case," he said.

"Many staff spend countless hours trying to help students get up to the standard necessary. It is widely recognised as a problem. But until these results have come out, we haven't had the firm evidence to indicate the scale of the problem.

"Employers are telling us that a large proportion are not capable of functioning at a professional level and they are not gaining employment at that level."

Prof Birrell said this was a problem wherever universities depended on overseas students for revenue.

"There is clearly a conflict of interest here," he said.