Abstract

English as a foreign language has been taught in Mexico for many years; however, there has been inadequate progress in the development of students’ English language proficiency. While this phenomenon has been addressed in previous studies from the perspective of one or two factors, we propose to address it from four factors, namely the role of English, language teaching, language learning, and the role of assessment to offer a deeper understanding of the topic. This is a quantitative non-experimental descriptive study that administered a questionnaire to 296 undergraduate students from a public university in Mexico who have taken English during their undergraduate studies. Results revealed that students are aware of the important role of English in their future careers and are satisfied with their teachers’ methodology, but they do little outside the classroom to practice or use the language. Students also acknowledge that the number of hours devoted to the teaching and learning of the language is one of the main limitations to attaining the proficiency level set as a graduation requirement.