The process of learning English for Mexican high school students: a graduation diagnostic test

Abstract

In Mexico, the High school Education Level establishes a personal development in its graduate profile in which, besides the linguistic knowledge of their mother tongue (L1), students must learn a second language (L2) to communicate in a global environment, English the language for a common understanding. For that reason, this article proposes the design of an exam that includes the course plan contents, the development of general and communicative competences, students’ needs, and their context to get a diagnostic of the level of their linguistic abilities development according to the criteria of the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR). After the exam’s design, it was applied to 165 sixth-semester high school students at a public university in Queretaro. After getting the answers to the test evaluation, the results showed the necessity for more development of reading and listening comprehension abilities and written production to acquire the desired level of proficiencyfor graduate students.