Abstract
The aim of this investigation was to ascertain the impact of English language proficiency on academic success of first-year black and Indian students in human resources management at Technikon Natal.
It was hypothesised that high English language proficiency may possibly predict technikon academic success.
The main emphasis of the study is concerned with factors influencing the academic success of black students. The Indian cohort is used mainly as a comparison group.
Comparisons with a group of black students who had completed their studies indicated that both past and present groups are essentially similar, but that the groups that had completed their studies had a slightly better overall pass rate.
Comparisons with the Indian group of students enrolled for the same course indicated that the Indian group consistently out-performed their black counterparts in all aspects of academic success.
The differences between the black and Indian students were such that statistically they may be regarded as two separate groups.
Significantly, the Indian group exhibited superior English language proficiency levels, compared to their black counterparts.
The hypothesis that English language proficiency is associated with academic success appears to be substantially correct. While traditional selection methods for entry to this course based on matriculation results produced high levels of predictability of academic success for the Indian students, this was not the case for either of the black student groups.
The marks for the Indian group, both in their matriculation and matriculation English results, correlated significantly with their first technikon marks. Progressive tests in English language courses for this group (matriculation, first test and final English language marks) showed increasingly high relationships with academic success.
By comparison, the matriculation and English language at matriculation results for both black groups were not significant indicators of academic success.
It appears that the strongest indicator of success for the black group were the marks they obtained in the English language course at the Technikon, even though these were a weaker predictor of success when compared with the Indian group. In addition, it appears that a number of culturally based variables may act as moderating variables for both English language proficiency and academic success.
Prof. JC Welman