A Variance Of Two Or More Bands To Be Indicative Of A Difference In Terminology Culture

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Excluding the above-mentioned items, 36 had a variance of two or more bands, considered above to be indicative of a difference in terminology culture.

For example, preposition was in Band 6 for Poland (59 out of 98 knew it), Band 5 for Austria (43 out of 75) and Band 9 for Hong Kong (115 out of 123).

There were eight 'extreme' items, where the discrepancy in bands was five or more. Table 3 shows these. Exceptional cases, where one score is separated from the other two by a difference of four bands or more, whether high or low, are marked in bold. Of these, the exceptional country was Hong Kong in four cases (definite article and indefinite article, which were lower, and conjunction and pronoun, which were higher) and Austria in two (present continuous tense and indirect speech, ...
... which both of course have synonyms - see below).

In no case was the Polish cohort 'the odd man out' (even though it was lowest in one case).Some possible explanations for these extreme findings are in order. The low scores for definite article and indefinite article in Hong Kong should not be taken as indicating that the concepts are not important there.

As is discussed below, the absence of a category such as articles in Chinese would suggest that having a way of referring to them is more important than in Austria. (Polish of course also has no articles.) The answer of course is that there are other ways of referring to them which are used in Hong Kong; the words themselves, 'a' and 'the', are used to refer eponymously (i.e. they are turned from linguistic into metalinguistic items).

The low score for modal verb in Austria may be because this concept is subsumed under auxiliary verb. Indeed, some Austrian students exemplified this latter term with modal verbs, but it has to be said that the familiarity with auxiliary verb was also low -band 3, compared to 5 for Poland and 2 for Hong Kong.

The high figure for conjunction among the Hong Kong subjects reflects the high priority given to this feature in teaching there (Yeung, 2006). Imperative may be unknown in Hong Kong because the non-technical 'command' is used (misleadingly) to refer to this grammatical structure.

In both cases where the Austrian result was exceptional, the term was one of a pair of synonyms: present continuous tense and indirect speech. An answer for the relatively high and low (respectively) results can be sought in this, as Table 4 elaborates. As can be seen, with indirect speech and reported speech, the difference in the former case is almost cancelled out by the difference in the latter; when the two are added together, the totals are almost the same.

Indirect speech is more popular in Austria, whereas reported speech is better known in Poland and Hong Kong. The same cannot be said for the second pair of synonyms - present continuous tense and present progressive tense, however. Although the totals for Poland and Hong Kong are similar, that for Austria lags behind.

Of course, the totals do not show how many students knew both terms, so it cannot be concluded that the concept is less important in Austria. As regards the third pair of synonyms, the questionnaire did not show any difference for concord but it did for agreement.