The Future of Education

As with many institutions of higher education, The Petroleum Institute in the UAE has an English proficiency requirement for all students to be admitted to take undergraduate courses. If students do not meet the minimum proficiency requirement, they are required to improve their English in a program called The Academic Bridge Program (ABP). While IELTS/TOEFL may act as a gatekeeper to ensure that all students have sufficient language proficiency, ABP faculty have observed that students may see this requirement and their subsequent participation in the ABP as an unnecessary hurdle that prevents them from commencing their university studies. Thus, many students express more interest in specific test preparation than in actually developing their academic language skills. We were interested to see how prevalent this preference for test preparation over holistic language development really was and how it might affect the instruction delivered.  We also wished to investigate the perceptions of the students who had passed the “obstacle” of the entrance requirement to see, in hindsight, what they wished they had learned in ABP now that they had completed their first university semester.  Finally, we explored teachers’ perspectives of what they thought their students wanted to learn and what they thought their students should actually learn in order to successfully pass from the ABP into their academic programs. By collecting survey data from different stakeholders and examining the relationships between their perspectives, we hope to gain more insight into students’ perceived and actual needs.