Verb Phrase, Complement, Concord And Finite Verb

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One other case where the Austrian result was quite different, though not achieving exceptional status, was the term predicate. It was expected that all groups would be weak on this rather arcane term.

Indeed, this expectation would have been self-fulfilling if the basic meaning of' everything in a clause after the subject' had been the only one allowed. But many Austrian students ticked it and gave consistent examples, which suggested that in their understanding it was equivalent to the concept of verb as grammatical function in a clause (e.g. student A3 wrote, 'He loves me' as an example).

It is clear, then, that predicate in Austria not only has a different meaning but also a different status. Referring to the distinction made in the introduction, we can say that in Austria it is - partly, at least - a pedagogic term ...
... (used in teaching and learning), whereas elsewhere it is a scientific term (used to write about and study the language).

This difference in status goes hand in hand with the difference in meaning. This is precisely the sort of finding the study set out to establish: a systematic difference in the use of terminology. The questionnaires were accordingly re-marked to allow this second meaning as an alternative answer.7

Even if this were reduced to cases where a difference of at least three bands applied, there would still be 15 items (to add to the seven extreme items). Some other observations can be made about pairs of complementary terms. As regards singular and plural, the former was relatively unpopular, but of course plural is the 'marked' term. Transitive verb and intransitive verb were very similar in profile, as were countable noun and uncountable noun, except in Hong Kong.

The same could not be said for comparative adjective and superlative adjective, which seemed almost the exact reverse of each other. In order to see whether there was any trend in terms of the distinction between pedagogic and scientific terminology, eight terms, which are more typical of scientific grammar, were extracted from the overall analysis. These excluded predicate (as discussed above) and the four terms which achieved straight zeroes in their banding: verb phrase, complement, concord and finite verb.

It would appear that scientific terminology is intruding somewhat into the secondary classrooms of the three countries: consistently in Poland, somewhat erratically in Hong Kong and least of all in Austria. Most 'progress' seemed to have been made in Poland, where several items were better known; even in cases where there was only a one-band difference, such as subjunctive and indirect object, there seemed to be a significant difference.

One could say that the Polish students were better prepared to embark on a course of scientific grammar at university than their peers from elsewhere, but of course this is not a sufficient justification for introducing such terminology at school. In any case, it is not possible to be dogmatic about which terms should be regarded as pedagogic and which as scientific.

This is not an all-or-nothing distinction; it is a cline with two extremes and a grey area in the middle. And as was seen above, a term that is scientific in one country, namely predicate, may be pedagogic in another. Indeed, it could be argued that agreement is regarded as a necessary pedagogic term in Hong Kong, which would explain its popularity in the findings.