3. Methodology
3.1 Setting
The International Islamic University Malaysia is an English medium university. All new intake students are
required to fulfil a minimum English language proficiency of EPT Band 6 (the equivalent of TOEFL 550 or
IELTS Band 6) before they are allowed to undertake credit-bearing faculty courses. Students who do not meet
the minimum language requirement would be placed in one of the 6 levels of the pre-sessional intensive English
language programme offered by the Centre for Languages and Pre-University Academic Programme.
3.2 Participants
The participants in this study were 129 post-secondary students studying English at the Centre for Languages
and Pre-University Academic Programme, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). They were
students from four levels of the pre-sessional intensive English language programme offered by the Centre. The
distribution of the students according to their respective levels is presented in Table 1. A total of 28 students were
from LEM 0320 (Level 1), 28 from LEM 0420 (Level 2), 40 from LEM 0520 (Level 3), and 33 from LEM 0620
(Level 4).