Preparing Prospective Healthcare Professional English Proficiency toward Global Competition: Does it matter?
Abstract
Today’s workers in health sectors are in high demand globally due to the decreasing number of workers of a productive age in several developed countries. Thus, communicating effectively in English has become a critical skill for health workers. Accordingly, most institute of health sciences prepares their graduate by requiring them to possess a certain level of English proficiency to graduate. One of the widely administered and recognized CEFR-based standardized language tests that assess the English language proficiency of non-native speakers is TOEIC. To ensure that those prospective healthcare professionals or health students possess a good mastery of English, a preparation course is commonly prepared and designed to support those future workers. Yet, the effectiveness of this preparation course in improving students’ TOEIC scores has not been further investigated, especially in Indonesia. Thus, this study employed a pre-experimental design to investigate the impact of the preparation course on students’ TOEIC score improvement. This study involved 341 students from various health-related departments. They were given the treatment of the TOEIC preparation course in between the pretest (mapping test) and posttest (TOEIC). Although the results showed a statistically significant increase in scores from the mapping test (M=277.67, SD=119.35) to the TOEIC (M=307.67, SD=131.46), t(340)=5.52, p<0.0001, the effect size suggests a modest practical gain (Cohen’s d=0.30). The online preparation course appears to have a positive but limited impact on students’ TOEIC score improvement. Thus, further refinement of the course content or teaching methods is encouraged to increase its effectiveness.
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References
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