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The influence of language family on academic performance in Year 1 and 2 MBBS students
Author(s) -
Mann Collette,
Canny Ben,
Lindley Jennifer,
Rajan Ramesh
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
medical education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.776
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1365-2923
pISSN - 0308-0110
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2010.03711.x
Subject(s) - demographics , local language , acculturation , language proficiency , psychology , medical education , foreign language , first language , language assessment , mathematics education , medicine , ethnic group , demography , sociology , computer science , pathology , anthropology , programming language
Medical Education 2010: 44 : 786–794Objectives Generally, in most countries around the world, local medical students outperform, in an academic sense, international students. In an endeavour to understand if this effect is caused by language proficiency skills, we investigated academic differences between local and international MBBS students categorised by native language families. Methods Data were available and obtained for medical students in their first and second years of study in 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2006. Information on social demographics, personal history and language(s) spoken at home was collected, as well as academic assessment results for each student. Statistical analysis was carried out with a dataset pertaining to a total of 872 students. Results Local students performed better than international students in first‐ (p < 0.001) as well as second‐year (p < 0.001) assessments. In addition, there was a main interaction effect between language family and origin in the first year (p < 0.05). For international students only, there was a main effect for language in the second year (p < 0.05), with students from Sino‐Tibetan language family backgrounds obtaining higher mean scores than students from English or Indo‐European language family backgrounds. Conclusions Our results confirmed that, overall, local students perform better academically than international students. However, given that language family differences exist, this may reflect acculturation rather than simply English language skills.