Relationship Between Knowledge of Terminology and Proficiency
The questionnaire was also used to investigate any correlation between knowledge of terminology and language proficiency. This was only possible with the Hong Kong students, who completed an extra item on their questionnaire showing the result of their Use of English examination (equivalent in its extent to an AS-level examination in the United Kingdom), which was taken the term before they started university. One hundred and eleven (out of the 123 Hong Kong subjects) filled in this item; the rest probably had not taken the examination and had alternative qualifications. Of these, 62 achieved a C grade or above, whereas 49 achieved a D (E is the lowest passing grade, but D is the lowest requirement for acceptance on these courses); the 10 respondents with A and B in the former group were also discounted in order to make the comparison more straightforward. (If they had been included, it could have been argued that most of the difference was down to them.) The remaining groups of 52 and 49 were considered to be sufficiently large to base a comparison on. Cheap Jeans Table 7 shows the results.
As can be seen, the difference between the means of the two groups is quite large and the figure for significance (via directional/test) was significant at the 0.05 level. This supports the finding of the previous study (Berry, 1997) in which a similar significance of p = 0.019 was found. In that study, the difference in means was somewhat smaller (23.14 vs. 21.81) but it was based on a much larger sample (324 overall). And the Use of English grades of the two groups were different because the entrance requirement for Business students in English is lower (E as opposed to D). The possible reasons for this link are many. It may be that a positive attitude on the part of the students towards English (and English teaching) influences their learning of the terminology as well as of the language. Or, it may be that schools where English is the medium of instruction (with the most competitive entrance standards and the more proficient students) are more traditional in their methodology. There is certainly no evidence here for a causative link, implying that teaching metalinguistic terminology will lead to greater proficiency (the concern of the studies by Alderson et al., 1997, and Steel & Alderson, 1994).
This section outlines some interesting phenomena that emerged during the marking of the exemplifications. A large proportion of the examples given by students were actually incorrect, indicating that they did not understand the term in question. The codes below indicate the country of origin of the student who gave the example (A for Austria, P for Poland and HK for Hong Kong). A number of terms that are similar in form were confused; for example, a few students gave an example for subject instead of subjunctive and one gave an example of a conjugation for conjunction. Another term that was confused was verb phrase. Many students offered examples of it but most were wrong (it was one of the least understood terms, ranked 49th).
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