Teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) should have a sufficient ability in using simple statistical formulas, which play an essential role in the process of assessment and evaluation. Converting raw scores, computing the average of scores and determining the homogeneity or the heterogeneity of a particular class are some of the tasks that the teachers can hardly accomplish without good knowledge about statistics. For this reason statistics is offered as one of the compulsory courses in the English Department of Surabaya State University (Unesa). It is expected that the course equip the pre-service teachers with basic knowledge about statistics so that they can perform assessment well in the in-service stage later. However, teaching statistics to them turned out to be challenging due to the different nature of statistics (numbers) and language (words).

 

The present paper reports the challenges that the author had when teaching statistics to undergraduates majoring in the teaching of English in Unesa and how to overcome them. It attempts to seek the answers to the following research questions: (1) How can the motivation of the EFL undergraduates to learn statistics be increased? (2) How can their understanding about the concepts of statistics be improved?

 

Approached qualitatively and quantitatively, this study was conducted by using mixed-method action research. The research subjects consisted of 43 students attending the Statistics class in the English Department, and were selected purposively. Data were collected from these students by means of the following instruments: observations, interviews and tests. The analysis of the qualitative data followed these procedures: (1) familiarizing and organizing, (2) coding and reducing, and (3) interpreting and representing. As to the quantitative data, computations were done to perform percentage analysis.

 

The results indicated that setting clear learning objectives and relating statistics to the undergraduates’ real life can increase their motivation to learn statistics. By knowing what they learn statistics for and how they can apply it in their daily life, the undergraduates could find meaning by taking the course and expend more efforts for effective learning. To improve their understanding about the concepts of statistics, it was better for them to avoid using machines immediately to analyze numbers; rather, they should learn to compute numbers manually while at the same time trying to find out what each term and symbol meant, how they were interrelated and how to interpret the results. Based on these findings, some implications for the teaching of statistics to the EFL undergraduates were described.