A survey on difficulties in meeting English language proficiency requirements of IT major students at Saigon University

Abstract

English language proficiency requirements are required at almost all universities in Vietnam for IT students in particular and non-English majors in general. However, those students have difficulty meeting the graduate degree requirement of English even though they have studied English during their university period. This research paper aims to find out the cause of this phenomenon and the solution to overcome it. There are 191 IT students who answered an online questionnaire about personal information, self-assessing their level of interest in English, self-proposing difficulties in meeting English language proficiency requirements and solutions. According to the results, most students found it difficult to obtain the English output certificate, citing a lack of time and practical study skills as the main obstacles. Regrettably, the results show that many students do not propose a specific solution to improve the problems, and some students do not even come up with a solution for themselves. However, several solutions are proposed in the end. Further research on the solutions for students to get the English language proficiency requirements should be conducted in the future.