Resumen

TORRES-ZAPATA, Ángel Esteban; BRITO-CRUZ, Teresa del Jesús  y  VILLANUEVA-ECHAVARRIA, José Rafael. English language knowledge dominion on first year university students: Information for decision making. RIDE. Rev. Iberoam. Investig. Desarro. Educ [online]. 2021, vol.11, n.22, e071.  Epub 20-Sep-2021. ISSN 2007-7467.  https://doi.org/10.23913/ride.v11i22.949.

Learning a foreign language specifically the English language, for Latin America countries is a must for every professional, due to the globalization phenomenon, this is the main reason why the English language has acquired a major role on a global scale. The main goal of the following research is to characterize the knowledge domain of the English language in first year students of the Health sciences faculty at a public university in southeast Mexico, as a guide to decision making and to actualize education programs curriculum. A quantitative research was employed, with a non-probabilistic sampling, to carry out this research, the entire first year student population for the 2020 generation for the health sciences faculty was taken into consideration. Data was gathered using a diagnosis test designed by the language center academy. It was divided in three sections I: Listening, II: Reading, III: Vocabulary and Grammar. The electronic version of the test was applied in July 2020, data gathered was analyzed on the month of August 2020. Results were processed with the statistics package SPSS 25.0 for Windows. A descriptive analysis was employed. Studied population accounted for 602 first year students belonging to 6 different educative programs of the health sciences school, of which n=424 (70.43%) were female and n=178 (29.57%) were male. Overall, 77.41% of the students had a knowledge dominion of the English language corresponding to the lower “Basic” level, being the students of the psychology major, the ones who did better on the test only on the lower “Basic” level, while Physical education students had the lowest performance. Knowledge dominion of the English language shown by these students is below the national average, this implies that they need more study time, it is also needed to identify deficiencies and issues in the English learning process during previous educational levels. It is possible to say that the university has an urgent call to actualize its curriculum and pedagogic orientations to improve the knowledge dominion of the English language and thus improve professional education quality.

Palabras llave : knowledge dominion; university students, english language.