subject: Terminology Culture of the Countries [print this page] There was an expectedly immense range in scores for the terminological items across the three countries, from 293 to 4 out of 296 (see the Appendix for full results).
Noun, for example was known to all of the Polish students, and only one of the Austrian and two of the Hong Kong students were not familiar with it, while concord was the least known.
As can be seen, three of the top five were word classes, whereas the entire bottom five was rather arcane scientific terms. In terms of distribution, there were a small number of items at each end of the scale with other items spread out fairly widely in between, as in the 1997 study.
When the top items are shown according to the country, an interesting picture emerges, as Table 2 shows. In Berry (1997), it was suggested that 90% be regarded as a safety threshold for terms that would not cause problems to groups of learners; if this is accepted, then only three (the top three overall incidentally) could be considered 'safe' in all three countries.
What is more noticeable from the above table is that Hong Kong has twice as many safe items as the other two. This suggests that Hong Kong teachers concentrate more on a limited number of terms, which in turn suggests that in terms of item scores it is more disparate than the other two, while, as we saw above, it is more homogeneous in terms of student scores.
The main aim of the study was to investigate whether there were any significant differences between the three groups' knowledge of certain terms. In other words, was there a difference between the 'terminology culture' of the three countries' classrooms were certain terms popular in one country but not in another.
To facilitate this comparison, and to make it objective, the raw scores were transformed into 10 bands (from 0 to 9), each representing 10% points (i.e. 0 represented 0%-9.9%, etc.). For a difference to be considered significant, it had to cross two bands (e.g. Band 1 in Country A and B and 3 in Country C). The band scores for each item according to the three groups are shown in the Appendix.
Of the fifty items, eight had no variance at all in their bands across the three countries. Apart from one (determiner at Band 1), these were all at one end or the other of the scale. Three were what might be called 'universal' terms, in that they achieved Band 9 in all three cases: noun, verb and plural (it will be observed that these took the top three overall ranks above). Four scientific terms achieved straight zeros (verb phrase, complement, concord and finite verb); again, these were the four bottom performers on the overall analysis.
Terminology Culture of the Countries
By: endeavor
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