Students’ Self-Perceived English Communication Skills Before and After an International Internship Program in Taiwan
Abstract
International internship programs are widely promoted as a bridge between classroom English instruction and authentic workplace communication, yet few studies examine Indonesian interns using a design that captures the true direction of change in their communication skills. This study aimed to describe and examine whether Indonesian students' self-perceived English communication skills, namely speaking confidence and listening comprehension, differed significantly before and after undertaking an international internship program in Taiwan. A quantitative retrospective post-then-pre survey design was used, in which 40 Indonesian interns working in Taiwan's hospitality, restaurant, food processing, factory, and catering sectors, selected through purposive sampling, rated their perceived skills for both time points within a single 20-item Likert-scale questionnaire. Data were analyzed using the Shapiro-Wilk normality test on the difference scores and paired samples t-tests, with Cohen's dz reported as the effect size. The four measurement sets showed high reliability (Cronbach's Alpha = 0.932 to 0.954). Results showed that students' self-perceived speaking confidence (M = 33.68 to 37.88), listening comprehension (M = 33.93 to 37.48), and overall communication skills (M = 67.60 to 75.35) all increased significantly after the internship (p < .05 for all three comparisons), moving from a neutral or moderate perception to a positive or high perception. However, the effect sizes were only medium (dz = 0.53 to 0.60), indicating that although the improvement was statistically significant, it was moderate rather than dramatic in magnitude. These findings suggest that the international internship in Taiwan is associated with a real but modest improvement in students' self-perceived oral communication skills. Universities are recommended to pair internship placement with structured pre-departure speaking and listening training, and future research is encouraged to use objective language assessments and larger, more diverse samples to confirm these self-reported gains.