Cognitive Skills of Accounting Students: Does Language Proficiency Matter?

• In Event: Emerging Research Papers

Abstract

In view of relatively little research on the performance of accounting students with English as a second language, this study investigates the effect of language proficiency on students’ cognitive skills. Bloom’s taxonomy, which is reevaluated by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001), is adopted to identify different aspects of cognitive skills: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. An Ordinary Least Squares Regression analysis on 126 subjects indicates that what matters for cognitive skills does not rest in language proficiency. Students’ general math skill is found to be more crucial in developing different levels of cognitive skills on accounting knowledge.

Authors

• Jing-Wen Yang, California State University, East Bay

• Lan Wu, California State University East Bay