Since the present study aims to comprehensively investigate the English needs of doctoral students, to achieve the breadth, the expense might be the lack of the depth.
For example, when the participants were asked about the four language skills’
importance to their current study and future career, the present study did not further discuss the relationship between the given answers and the different disciplines/future plans of the participants. Students from a particular discipline or with a similar future plan might have parallel language needs or problems. To attain a more profound depth of understanding, one could narrow the research scope to a specific discipline, and gather more detailed information about the shared needs of a particular group.
Similarly, to better understand the efficacy of current English courses, it would be
helpful to investigate how students evaluate the current English training provided by the university. It is of interest to know if students actually benefit from these courses.
What are the reasons that make students value or devalue an English course?
It would also be interesting to know more about students’ or teachers’ attitude toward the graduation requirement in English. It should be admitted that in the present study, the definition of the graduation requirement was not clearly specified. It was temporarily assumed to be a proficiency test or a certain amount of required courses.
However, the comments from the participants revealed that they seemed to have different preferences about what a graduation requirement should be. Of particular interest would be further research which examines the causes behind the preferences of students or teachers, and the language requirement which is regarded by the majority as most appropriate. Likewise, since teachers’ oral ability were regarded as one of the reasons which affected the efficacy of English lecturing, it might also be of interest to further investigate content teachers’ self-evaluation of their ability to lecture in English, and if they are willing to conduct their courses in English.
Finally, as indicated earlier, the participants surveyed in this study were selected exclusively from one research-oriented university in Taiwan. Thus, the results might not be representative of the whole doctoral student and teacher population. Therefore, further research with more participants in different universities is highly recommended. In addition, it is of interest to examine the same issue from language teachers’ perspectives, and to compare the similarities or differences among the perceptions of students, content teachers, and language teachers. Since the current research mainly employed the survey techniques in data collection, further research adopting qualitative approach is also highly recommended. It is expected that qualitative research could provide more in-depth understanding of the language needs and learning difficulties of doctoral students.
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APPENDIXES