Quantifying the impact of language on the performance of international accounting students: A cognitive load theory perspective

Abstract

This study offers timely empirical evidence of the magnitude of the language effect on the performance of different language user groups, namely English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as a Second Language (ESL), and English as a Native Language (ENL) in an accounting program instructed in English, an area that has been under researched. Informed by Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), this study develops an innovative research methodology (crossover repeated measures design), drawing on a large data analysis (n=2912) of students' academic results in six accounting specialisation subjects between 2007 and 2014 in an Australian university's undergraduate accounting program. Results show that while all language user groups perform worse in more conceptually (MC) oriented subjects compared to less conceptually (LC) oriented subjects, the relative performance between MC and LC is strongly related to English language user groups. For the first time the magnitude of the impact is derived. The study has implications for the instructional design of accounting programs in English-speaking universities and their offshore programs in non-English speaking countries.

Bilingual learning strategies to support Chinese EAL business students

“…Sweller et al (2011) state that teaching academic content in a foreign language requires explicit foreign language instructional support, otherwise students’ working memory can be overloaded by simultaneously processing new content and the foreign language. Typically, EFL/EAL learners use mental translation to comprehend English language (Yau, 2011), which links working memory with long-term memory but slows down the cognitive process (Yang and Farley, 2019) resulting in a “translation time-lag” caused by thinking in L1 and then translating into L2 (Ashton-Hay and Pillay, 2011, p. 799).…”

“…According to CLT, information is first processed by short-term working memory before being stored in long-term memory through the building of schema , which are cognitive constructs that organise new information into categories to assist the application of intellectual skills needed to process information (Sweller, 1994). However, as working memory has limited capacity learning becomes less efficient if the cognitive load exceeds working memory capacity (Yang and Farley, 2019). Educators need to efficiently manage their students’ limited cognitive resources in working memory and facilitate transfer to long-term memory via complex schema (Wynder, 2018).…”

Comparison of Chinese and Western English language proficiency measures in transnational business degrees

“…While recognising the difficulty of collecting data for a single cohort of students concurrently having multiple ELP evidence (Davies, Brown, Elder, Lumley, & McMamara, 1999), the design in most prior research cannot effectively control for the cohort variation, and risks results being inconclusive or misleading, without the inclusion of a large number of student characteristics as control variables (for example, individual differences, level of commitment, and social and demographic characteristics). To address this limitation, this study adopts a comparative design methodologya crossover repeated measures (CRM) design (Jones & Kenward, 2014;Yang & Farley, 2019), where each student has results for all four ELP measures (CEP, EAP, SELP, and diploma) analysed, to control for student specific factors other than ELP measures in predicting students' academic performance. This is the first study that uses a CRM design to undertake the comparative analysis of Chinese and Western ELP measures, or even just three Western ELP measures, to predict academic performance in English-medium TNE programs.…”

“…For example, a finding about an EAP cohort who performed weaker than a SELP test taker cohort could possibly be explained by the difference in academic ability between the EAP cohort and the SELP test taker cohort. Another issue is the use of raw academic grades to measure students' performance across different disciplines with different proportions of EAP and SELP students, without controlling for the assessment and grading differences in different discipline-specific areas of study (see Yang & Farley, 2019). Results would be more rigorous if the comparison is made through comparing the results of the same cohort of international students who concurrently have multiple different forms of ELP evidence.…”

Financial Statement: Language View Points using Genre analysis

“…The magnitude of the impact is calculated for the first time. The study has implications for accounting program instructional design in English-speaking universities as well as its offshore programs in non-English speaking countries (Yang & Farley, 2019).…”