PERMISOS ORDINARIOS

Student groups seem to have given different numbers of deviant answers, and the range is wide: the standard deviation is greater than the mean for the entire student population. Table 16 lists the mean number of questionable or inappropriate answers per student in the various groups. The table is formed based on the items that all teachers rated either as questionable or

inappropriate (the lenient approach). As we can see, students majoring in English had the lowest mean (2.49 errors per student), and they had the smallest number of errors overall. The second best group was students at Helsinki University of Technology (7.55 errors per student on average), although it is not easy to compare the groups as the number of students in them varied substantially. Perhaps surprisingly, the least successful group was not the Grammar group but the students of Visual Arts (18.08 errors per student); however, the group was also the smallest (only 12 students) and it is possible that a few low-achieving individuals distort the figures. Table 16. Statistics on the errors per student group

Student group Number of students (N) Average of errors per student (mean) Standard deviation (SD) Total number of errors (sum) Smallest number of errors (minimum) Highest number of errors (maximum) English Majors 35 2.49 2.15 87 0 8 Grammar 42 14.50 13.80 609 1 56 Humanities 31 8.65 8.10 268 0 43 Visual Arts 12 18.08 6.04 217 6 26 Computer Science 17 13.88 11.82 236 3 38 Technology 182 7.55 7.40 1375 0 39 Total 319 8.75 9.21 2792 0 56

The range in the number of errors was wide: while some had no errors, some students had as many as 56 responses that the teachers rated as either inappropriate or questionable, which is over 50% of the slots (although in some cases this is because the student did not provide an answer to all the slots). However, some students’ language skills seemed to be considerably lower than some of their peers. The range was the narrowest within English Majors and the widest, surprisingly, within Grammar students and students in the Humanities. However, the average in the Humanities was much lower than in the Grammar group, which means that there were more low-achievers within the Grammar group than in the Humanities group. The difference between the group mean ranks was highly significant in the Kruskal-Wallis test, H(5) = 70.3, p < .001. In the post hoc pairwise comparisons, the English Majors were statistically significantly different from each of the other groups (p < .001 for each pairwise comparison with the English Major group). Furthermore, statistically significant differences were also found between the pairs Technology*Grammar (p = .003), Technology*Visual Arts (p < .001) and Humanities*Visual Arts (p = .025). The other pairs were not statistically significantly different from one another. The scores are available in Table 17.

Table 17. The pairwise comparisons with Mann-Whitney following the Kruskal-Wallis, with the student groups compared against each other group when analysing the number of errors

The range in the number of questionable and inappropriate answers was wide, from 0 to 56 errors. Of the 319 students, 14 students made no errors; 130 students made 1-5 errors, 88 students made 6-10 errors, 40 students made 11-15 errors, and 47 students made 16 or more errors. The errors are broken into student groups in Table 18, and Figure 24 provides a visual presentation of the number of errors per student group.

Table 18. The distribution of errors per student group

Number of errors

Majors Grammar Humanities Visual Arts Computer Science Technology Total 0 7 - 1 - - 6 14 1-5 25 9 9 - 5 82 130 6-10 3 13 13 1 5 53 88 11-15 - 10 5 3 1 21 40 16-20 - 2 1 3 1 7 14 21-25 - 1 1 3 1 4 10 26-30 - 1 - 2 2 4 9 31-35 - - - - 1 2 3 36-40 - 2 - - 1 3 6 41-45 - 2 1 - - - 3 46-50 - 1 - - - - 1 50- - 1 - - - - 1 Total 35 42 31 12 17 182 319

Next, the students with the highest and the lowest performance are described in more detail in relation to the background factors. Of the 14 students who made no errors, four had received the highest mark at school (10) and six the highest mark (laudatur) in the matriculation examination; eight students had received the second highest mark (9) at school and seven students had earned the second highest mark (eximia cum laude approbatur) in the matriculation examination. One student did not give her school mark, one had received the third highest school mark (8) and one student had received the third highest mark (magna cum laude approbatur) in the matriculation examination. Seven of these high-achieving students studied English as their major, one studied a non-language subject in the Faculty of Humanities, and six studied at Helsinki University of Technology.

At the other end, there were also 14 students who made at least 31 errors, even when rating with the most lenient norm. Of these, two students had earned mark 8 at school, four had earned mark 7, four mark 6 and two mark 5. Two students did not indicate which mark they had received. In the matriculation examination, two students had earned the third highest mark (magna cum laude approbatur), three had the fourth highest mark (cum laude approbatur), six had received the fifth highest mark (lubenter approbatur) and one the lowest pass mark (approbatur). Two students did not indicate which mark they had earned. In this low-achieving group, there were no English Majors or Visual Arts students. The low-achievers were one student from the Faculty of Humanities, two students from Computer Science, six students from the Grammar group and five students from Helsinki University of Technology.

As we have seen above, the length of time spent in English-speaking countries does not seem to correlate with the number of errors made in the test. Of the 14 students who made at least 31 errors, 11 had never been to an English-speaking country for more than short holidays. One student had stayed in an English-speaking country for one month, one student for three months and one student for five months. Similarly, of the 14 students who made no errors at all, ten had never spent even a month in an English-speaking country, while three had stayed in an English- speaking country for more than a month but less than a year (1, 3 and 9 months), and one student had spent one full year in an English-speaking country. Thus, although staying in a country where English is spoken as the native language increases the likelihood of success in English, it does not guarantee good performance in accuracy, and the fact that many students who had not stayed in an English-speaking country performed very well indicates that learners can successfully acquire a good command of English verb forms even without extensive, day-to- day contacts with native speakers. It may be that exchange periods, for example, mainly affect

students’ fluency, not their accuracy. Actually, 82% of the entire respondent population (262 students) had not visited an English-speaking country for more than a month, and the percentage for the subgroup of students with more than 31 errors is 79%, which is almost identical to that of the overall population. 71% of the students with no errors had not spent much time in English-speaking countries, either. Since this is more than half of the population, we can conclude that longer visits to English-speaking countries do not in themselves increase accuracy in grammar. Note also that all of the students who had spent longer than a year in an English- speaking country made errors, ranging from 1 to 9 errors per student.

As we have seen above, there is a connection between the number of errors and school and matriculation marks in English, which is not surprising. However, the only student with a fail mark in English at school did not score too poorly: this student had 17 errors, while many students who had better marks from school scored worse. Marks 5-8 were prone to more variation in the number of errors the students make. A similar tendency is visible with the correlation between the number of errors and the matriculation examination mark, with greater variation observed with marks in the middle of the spectrum. Interestingly, however, there were two students who had the best mark in the matriculation examination yet made 18 errors, while the best two students with the lowest pass mark (approbatur) made 11 and 15 errors. Of course, there may be a connection here to extended visits abroad and to other means of increased use of English, but as we have seen above, extended exposure to English may not necessarily increase students’ accuracy. This means that although good school marks are a good indicator of success at the group level, there are individual exceptions as well.