English Language Acquisition among Non-Native Speakers

摘要

As a monolingual country, it is interesting to study how undergraduate students in China learn a foreign languages effectively during their four years at a university. This study aims to examine the duration of learning and mastery of English language among students in a university in Beijing. The research also examine whether there were significant differences between the respondents' background with their English proficiency. The number of respondents that participated in the research consists of 117 students enrolled in an English program. The study found that almost half of the students spent two years (22 persons, 19.5%) and 3 years (23 persons, 20.4%) to master English. The one way ANOVA showed that there were significant differences in learning English among the respondents according to the time used to speak English outside the classroom, the importance of the English language as perceived by the students, and the English proficiency level of the students. Universities can adopt more effective approaches to improve the learning of English based on the results of the study.