Does the writing of undergraduate ESL students develop after one year of study in an English-medium university?

•We investigated the writing development of 101 undergraduate ESL students after one year of study.•We found no statistically significant development on all discourse measures except fluency.•The interview and questionnaire data show that students receive very little feedback on their writing in content classes.

English language skills are often listed by employers among key attributes needed for employment and there is a general dissatisfaction with English standards, especially writing skills, following graduation (e.g., Healy and Trounson, 2010 and Rowbotham, 2011 in the Australian context). In the case of ESL students, research on whether English proficiency improves after studying at an English-medium university has to date been scarce, and has generally examined students’ gains after a relatively short duration. The current study examined students’ ESL writing proficiency following a year's study in an Australian university. The study used a test-retest design. A range of measures was used to assess writing, including global and discourse measures. All participants were also surveyed and a subset was interviewed. The study found that students’ writing improved after a year of study but only in terms of fluency. There were no observed gains in accuracy, syntactic and lexical complexity. Global scores of writing also showed no change over time. Students stated in their questionnaires and interviews that they did not receive any feedback on their writing from their content lecturers. We discuss our findings in relation to the students’ second language (L2) proficiency and the nature of their immersion experience.