Students of English at university: Awareness, expectations and failure issues

The analysis of the EFL P.Æ.C.E. Corpus (Landolfi 2012a) shows that university students are fully aware of the multifaceted value of English in our contemporary world and feel unsatisfied when considering their failure in language learning particularly in the presence of a significant number of years of exposure to formalized language learning prior to university enrollment. Despite their past negative experiences, however, students’ desire to own the target language still pushes them to enroll in English courses and nurtures their expectations for future success. Though desires can be considered strong motivating factors, which supposedly lead to academic achievements, students’ expectations may hide problems particularly when factors that lead to failure are out of focus and expectations are too high to be fulfilled in one academic course. The present article intends to address the above issues with the scope to show that students’ voiced/implied Self-representations illustrate despair in admitting incompetency in English but also lack of responsibility in the learning process or inappropriate blame transfer. Both issues poorly match their voiced desire to reach out toward a futuristic, language competent Self. The distance between the two Self-representations constitutes an intersection where language teachers may play a significant role guiding students toward a successful reframing of their expectations so as to overcome the issue and reduce/avoid future blocks in language learning, fear-entanglements, and/or detachment from the academic path.