抄録
Clearly, most students and their financial supporters hope to spend as little time as possible in an EAP programme and to enrol for content classes as soon as possible. However, from a pedagogical perspective there may be disadvantages to exiting an EAP programme too quickly. This paper focuses on the benefits of spending a longer period in EAP in relation to reading skills, by comparing the reading sub-skills of students who have already spent one semester or more in the EAP programme with others who enter the programme and are placed at the same level, in order to determine any advantages that might be offered by spending a longer period of time in the EAP programme. Overall, the results show no clear superiority in language proficiency for one group over the other at the time of entering EAP level 3. The new students had significantly higher TOEFL reading section scores and total vocabulary size, whereas the continuing students were found to have more knowledge of high frequency vocabulary. In terms of TOEFL Listening and Written Expression section scores, total TOEFL scores, word decoding speed and knowledge of words at the 1,000 and 4,000 word levels, the lack of statistically significant differences indicates that despite entering the university with a lower proficiency level, one semester of EAP instruction was sufficient to lift up the proficiency level of the continuing students to that of the new students.
