Two types of language exposure as predictors of Students' academic success in EFL: a case of undergraduate students at the university of Bahrain

The purpose of the study reported here was to investigate the relation between the level of 'academic' proficiency in English as a foreign language attained by a sample of Bahraini university students and two qualitatively different kinds of exposure to the language: extracurricular exposure outside the formal environment of the classroom and sheltered curricular exposure through English-medium instruction in subjects other than English language. The results demonstrate a significant association between both kinds of exposure and students' performance on a cloze test for the sample as a whole and more particularly for the Iow achievers. However, high achievers' performance on the cloze tended to be slightly influenced only by their unsheltered exposure to the language. It is interesting to note here that none of the two kinds of exposure had any signifIcant impact on proficiency attainment of any of the three different types of respondents. As for students' academic success at the university, it was only their proficiency attainment which tended to highly correlate with their GP A This was also found to be true for both the high and the Iow achievers. Neither type of language exposure had any positive influence on students' GP A except for the Iow achievers whose GP A is surprisingly found to be negatively influenced by their degree of unsheltered exposure to the language. In this report, I first discuss the relevant research literature and the background and rationale of the present study and then present an analysis and interpretation of the statistical findings. I conclude by considering the pedagogic implications of the findings for different categories of learners and the theoretical implications for Krashen's Comprehensible Input Hypothesis