English Test Performance and The Contextual Factors On Tertiary Education

Abstract

Even though English has remained an important element at different levels of education, studies in different parts of the world indicate that proficiency and performance in English can be a challenge. A specific example is the case of Mexico. Learning English has been stated as important in the Mexican education system for decades, yet, Mexico has held low proficiency in English for a long time. This study forms part of a larger mixed-methodology study of an institution of higher education in southeast Mexico. This paper aims to explore the descriptive results of 882 first-year university students on an English institutional test to study their language performance and the salient contextual factors. The test results were analyzed using descriptive statistics and correlations using SPSS, version 21. The results show that students’ English test performance is mostly low.  Independent sample t-tests indicate that while gender is not an influencing factor on test performance, higher exam scores are associated with the type of high school education.