Students’ perception and motivation towards english medium instruction at higher education

Recently many Bangladeshi universities offer undergraduate programs using English as a medium of instruction because of growing demand of English in a national and an international arena. On the other hand, there is very little actual information about what attracts students to an English medium education. At the same time, it is true that English medium higher education is very much challenging considering the present educational situation of Bangladesh. But like other developing countries, in Bangladesh the number of students’ studying English medium universities has been gradually increasing. For this reason, the aim of the present study is to identify the primary sources of motivation underlying students’ decision for selecting an Englishmedium education, students’ assessment of their English language skills, and their perceptions of difficulties they may have studying through the medium of English. For the students’ motivation, it is found that the participants primarily support instrumental reasons for studying the medium of English including utilitarian and academic reasons. However, regarding integrative reasons, the results provided evidence that participants showed their positive motives for the long term impact of studying English as a medium of instruction. In the same way, data for the students’ perception of their language skills revealed that most of students had positive attitudes towards their general and specific purpose of language skills.