The Use and Knowledge of ELT Grammatical Terminology Is Not a Global Monolith

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Author: Allan Lee

Overall, the groups of students in this study knew between two fifths and one half of the terms offered to them. The Polish students knew the most and the Austrians the least. However, there was wide variation on the student scores within each group, suggesting that no group could be regarded as homogeneous. These differences probably reflect in part the varying amount of exposure to terminology they received in their secondary studies. The main conclusion must be that the use and knowledge of ELT grammatical terminology is not a global monolith. There was wide variation in the knowledge of individual terms (and, therefore, presumably in their secondary classroom use) between the three groups. Three types of inter-group difference were found, the first two of which were expected but the third not: Thomas Sabo Charms

(1)Same term, different level of knowledge. The most common difference was cases where a term was found to be popular in two of the populations but not in the third; or in one but not in the other two. The most obvious examples were indefinite article, known to 95% of Polish students but to only 29% of the Hong Kong ones, and imperative, which was known to 71% of the Austrians but to only 5% of the Hong Kong students. However, many other items were not far behind these two.Six other items had a difference of 5 or more bands and 28 others of two or more.

(2)Same concept, different terms. Three pairs of synonyms were included in the questionnaire. In one case, indirect speech and reported speech, the two terms seemed to be in complementary distribution; where one term was unknown in one population, this was compensated for by knowledge of the other term, suggesting that the concept is similarly important in all three countries and that it is only the means of reference that differs. Poland and Hong Kong favored reported speech, for instance, whereas Austria preferred direct speech. Some of the differences which appeared to belong to the above category could be explained in terms of this. In other words, the reason for the low scores for definite article, indefinite article and imperative in the Hong Kong students could be attributed to the use of synonyms such as eponymous terms ('a' and 'the') or a non-technical term ('command').

(3)Same term, different meaning (and status). One term, predicate, was found to have an unexpected meaning for the Austrian students. This difference in meaning corresponded to a difference in status: pedagogic in Austria but scientific in Poland and Hong Kong. While this may be a unique result, there are other polysemous scientific terms (e.g. complement, whose polysemy was not exposed in this study, even though the term was included). This case demonstrated that the difference between scientific and pedagogic terminology is not absolute.

Overall, then, terminological cultures would seem to exist. The differences were not just idiosyncratic according to the items. There did seem to be an overall pattern in that, of the three countries, Poland and Austria were closest in their ELT terminological culture. An interesting avenue for further research would be to investigate other areas where there might be systematic pedagogical differences, for example the rules of thumb that learners are familiar with.