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EXTRAMURAL ENGLISH ACTIVITIES AND INDIVIDUAL LEARNER DIFFERENCES
Table 16. Results of independent samples t-tests investigating
the differences between students having a C1 level English language exam certificate
and students not having one
Yes (n=23) | No (n=302)
EE activities t P d
M SD M SD
1. EE watching series 4.35 | .77 | 3.84 | 1.24 | 2.87 |.007* | .42
9. EE watching videobloggers on | 4.48 | .84 | 3.86 | 1.33 | 3.19 | .003*
47
YouTube
6. EE reading websites 4.74 | 45 | 3.92 | 1.16 | 7.13 | .001* | .73
11. EE reading books 2.78 | 1.24 | 1.95 | 1.25 | 3.09 | .002* | .67
18. EE reading news 4.00 | 1.00 | 3.22 | 1.47 | 3.47 | .002*| .54
Note. Statistical significance level of t-tests: *p<.05
The data show that in the case of the five EE activities where statistically
significant differences were found, students possessing a Cl level foreign lan¬
guage exam engage in certain EE activities more frequently than students not
having a C1 level foreign language exam. This suggests that the English language
proficiency of these students, similar to participants possessing a B2 level
certificate, may also be better than those of other students. This means that
the language exam requirement may have a positive effect on foreign language
skills emphasized by Novak and Fénai (2020), which may ultimately influence
the frequency of engagement in EE activities in the Hungarian secondary school
context as students may consciously wish to improve their EFL skills.
For the last two background variables, i.e., whether students participated
in foreign language exchange programs in an anglophone or non-anglophone
country, no statistically significant differences were identified. These seem to
be less significant factors in how often students engage in EE activities. On the
whole, in the case of the statistically significant differences presented earlier,
it may be concluded that students who have a B2 or Cl level foreign language
exam certificate and those whose first foreign language learned at school was
English engage in EE activities more frequently than their peers.
5.5.3 Categorizing students’ EE activities: factor analysis
As there were altogether 18 EE activities in the questionnaire, this would make
further statistical analyses more difficult as besides these 18 activities, there
were several other scales used in the study. In order to make further analyses
easier, factor analysis was used to reduce the number of activities in the ques¬
tionnaire to a relatively more manageable number of factors. The negative
aspect of this procedure is the inevitable data loss that accompanies data
* 100 +