Good high school language marks key to university success: study
Language most important variable, research by U of O professor shows
Students who do well in high school language courses are more likely to make a successful transition to first year university than those who don’t, a new study has found.
The study, published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, is based on research done by Sylvie Lamoureux, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute.
It found that success in high school language courses is by far the most important variable that accounts for differences in academic performance among first-year university students.
Among English-speakers, doing well in high school English courses accounted for 25 per cent of the academic performance variability of firstyear students. Among Frenchspeakers, good marks in high school French accounted for 32 per cent.
By comparison, the next largest variable was the school board students came from prior to university, and that accounted for just five per cent of the differences in academic performance.
“If people ask us, ‘What is one thing I can really work on while in high school?’, well, make sure you have excellent language skills,” Lamoureux said in an interview.
Virtually all students admitted to university have grade point averages well above 80 per cent. “If we have all these kids who have pretty much the same average coming in, how do we explain why some do better and some do worse at the end of the first year?” Lamoureux said.
The study looked at Ontario students enrolled at the University of Ottawa since 2008. It considered a number of variables, including gender, language of instruction, and the school and school board they came from.
Students whose average in Grade 12 language courses was below 80 per cent were more likely to struggle during their first year of university, Lamoureux said.
“You might have a great average, but if you don’t invest yourself in reading and writing skills that are being developed in your English course, that might explain part of the drop in marks at the end of your first year.”
Relatively poor performance in high school language courses correlates to poorer performance overall in university, the study found. That’s likely because students who don’t excel in high school language courses lack the advanced literacy skills universities demand, Lamoureux said.
It comes down to the principle of university literacy, she said. Texts assigned by professors are often more difficult to read than those assigned in high school. “Academics don’t generally tend to write for the general public,” Lamoureux pointed out.
“The students who have developed high-level literacy, who can write in different registers easily, have more success in absorbing the material they’re learning at university and clearly providing answers on examinations or essays,” she said.
University students need what Lamoureux calls “social linguistic competency. It’s that ability to identify the register that is expected of you in a certain situation, and to be able to easily access the vocabulary that will make your writing stay in that register.”
Lamoureux said she and her fellow researchers were surprised by the importance of good grades in high school language courses in explaining differences in academic performance at university.
They had expected gender to be a significant factor, but the study found it accounted for less than one per cent of the variation, as did the high school students attended.
She didn’t have an explanation for the relative importance of school boards, but suggested it may be because of different standards among boards in grading students.
The researchers are now studying students in the University of Ottawa’s science and engineering programs, analyzing the impact of Grade 12 math and science requirements on first-year performance. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to publish something in the spring,” she said.