Learner Perception of Academic Register at the Undergraduate Level

This article reports on a study conducted to gain insight into how Polish undergraduate students perceive and experience the academic variety of English. Using research data drawn from two distinct tertiary educational settings, we investigate the development of the students’ notion of academic register over the course of a year of EAP instruction. Open-ended questionnaires were administered to 90 undergraduate students enrolled in academic reading courses at two different Polish universities at three points during the instructional period (at the onset, in the middle and at the end of the course). Areas investigated included the participants’ overall understanding of the idiosyncratic nature of EAP as well as the aspects of academic register which caused the most difficulty. The goal of the study was to identify the inventory of features most frequently associated with academic register by the participants and to determine the most challenging aspects of academic texts.