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Articles

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2001):

English academic language skills: Perceived difficulties by undergraduate and graduate students, and their academic achievement

  • Robert Berman
  • Liying Cheng
Submitted
October 15, 2012
Published
2010-04-20

Abstract

An EAP needs survey conducted at a major Canadian university among first-year Bachelor's- and Master's-level students reveals that native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of English perceive that the language skills that are necessary for academic study are of different levels of difficulty. Furthermore, English language difficulties appear to negatively affect the academic achievement of NNS graduate students as compared to their NS peers. However, such difficulties, although acknowledged to exist by NNS undergraduates, do not appear to affect their academic performance as compared with that of their NS counterparts.