English Receptive Skills of Undergraduate Students in Thai Higher Education Institutions
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Abstract
This study aimed to determine the proficiency of English receptive skills of the undergraduate students studying in Thai higher education institutions, and investigate the factors affecting the English receptive skills proficiency. The participants in this study were 320 undergraduates randomly sampled from different eight autonomous universities in four regions of Thailand, namely North, Northeast, Southern, and Central. The 40 students selected from each university both males and females studying in different majors were asked to take the actual English standardized test, TOEIC, and the data were, then, analyzed, and shown in Standard Deviation (S.D.), Mean, Min, and Max scores. To confirm if there are some significant differences between and within variables, the Dunnett T3 Paired Samples t-Test has been applied. The findings revealed that all variables in this study (universities, genders, years of study, and majors of study) compared both between groups and within groups of the English receptive skills, listening, reading, and both skills have significant difference. The students’ TOEIC listening mean scores were 204.41, while the reading mean scores were 138.14. Interestingly, the TOEIC total mean score was only 342.55 out of 990. Considering other variables of the students’ ethnography, the female students have achieved higher mean scores than that of male students, and the social science students have performed higher scores than that of the students from science majors while the years of study had no significant difference. To summarize, the proficiency of English receptive skills of Thai undergraduate students studying in Thai higher education institutions can be considered as the “Basic User” level following The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).
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