What happens to ESL students’ writing after three years of study at an English medium university?

• We investigated the writing development of 31 undergraduate ESL students over three years.
• We collected writing samples at the beginning and end of undergraduate study, and interviewed the students at the end of the study.
• We found no statistically significant development on all discourse measures except fluency.
• The interview data show that students are not required to do much writing and receive little feedback on their writing in content classes.

The number of international students coming to study in Australian universities has increased exponentially in the past decade, mirroring trends in other English speaking countries. For the majority of these students, English is an additional language. The motivation for studying in an English medium university is presumably not only to gain a degree but also to improve English language proficiency. Studying in an English-medium university provides these students with a rich immersion environment. However, research on whether these students’ English proficiency does improve has to date been scarce, and has generally examined students’ gains after a relatively short duration (e.g., 12 weeks). The current study examined 31 undergraduate students’ L2 (ESL) writing proficiency following a three-year degree study in an Australian university. The study used a test–retest design which required participants to write a 30-minute argumentative essay on the same topic at the commencement and at the end of their degree program. A range of measures was used to assess writing, including global and discourse measures. All participants were also interviewed about their writing experiences at the university. The study found that students’ writing improved after three years of study but only in terms of fluency; changes in accuracy, grammatical and lexical complexity, as well as global scores of writing fell short of significance. The students reported in the interviews that they were not required to do much writing in their degree studies and when they did, their lecturers almost exclusively commented on the content of their writing. We discuss our findings in relation to the students’ L2 proficiency, the nature of the test, and the nature of their immersion experience.