Data analysis
Autor: Chris Varnier | Publicado: 2009-07-17T15:47:00-07:00

As we expected before applying the tests, in the first general graph we can observe that students were much better in the first activity. They got almost 90 % of the answers correct. We believe this happened because the words were familiar to them. We noticed that 12% of students got all the right answers, i.e., one hundred percent. However, the overall average decreased for the exercises number 2 (47%) and 3 (44%) where we asked them for a deeper knowledge of the English language. As we had forecast earlier they had a hard time trying to solve complex sentences.In the first activity, we observed that the Word ‘blue’ got 100% of the right answers. As we expected when creating the exercise, all students knew the meaning of most words, such as: blue (100%), bird (98%), Father (98%), Plant (92%), duck (94%), please (98%), bear (84%), coach (90%), children (98%) and gift (94%). Only two words got a low level of proficiency, such as: chick (58%) and sheet (22%). Students could not give the correct translation for this Word “sheet” because they seemed to get confused with words like “shit” and “ship”. We were able to reach this conclusion based on the meanings that they offered for these words.In the second activity, students got 47% of the correct answers. For some words they could easily fill in the right blanks. For example: children (90%), blue (74%) and Father (72%). On the other hand, they had a high index of mistakes when solving words such as: please (82% wrong), bear (78% wrong) and coach (94% wrong). It is interesting that in the seventh sentence, 28% of students completed the gaps using the word “bird” instead of “coach”.In the third exercise, they got the lowest percentage of right answers: 44%. They were not able to translate the following words and they had several difficulties: blue (70% wrong), plant (98% wrong), ducked (76% wrong) and coach (70% wrong). Analyzing the word “blue”, we observed that 56% of the students gave a positive meaning like “feeling calm, well, good...”.This result is interesting since the students tested were Portuguese native speakers from Brazil, and in their culture, when they use the word blue saying that, it means that something is fine. Therefore they could be thinking in Portuguese and not in English when giving the answers. It is worth mentioning a very interesting fact that two words called our attention in a very specific way because they presented opposite developments during the tests: these were the words “children” and “sheet”. The word “children” in the first exercise achieved 98% of right answers. Then in the second, 90% of students could fill in the blank with the correct definition. Finally, in the third exercise, when the word was presented in an unusual context, only 50% of the students gave the expected translation. In the opposite way, the word “sheet” was identified by only 22% of the students in the first exercise, but they had 48% of the right answers in the second and an amazing 50% in the third one. So, we could prove that a common word, for example, “children” (98% correct in the first exercise) cannot be identified in a more difficult context (36% correct in the third exercise). Whereas an unknown word like “sheet” (which scored only 22% in the first exercise) can be identified when presented within a context (50%) despite the fact that we considered this an unusual or more difficult context for this level of EFL students . This we can observe in our project that the context can modify drastically EFL students’ understanding of lexical items when presented within context and without any context.