Simon Chan (2015)
The main idea of this paper is to provide tips for mathematics teachers who support EFL (English as Foreign Language) students especially for the situation those students cope word problems in English. He identifies linguistics challenges for EFL students into several categories: word, phrase, clause, discourse, and collocation and so on. The mathematics teacher, according to his suggestion, should unpack the complexity of word problems to help the students understand the situation, background condition, and targeted calculation in given word problems. Additionally, he argues that English language teachers can help the students to grasp sentences in word problems from the perspective of English acquisition, and suggest that collaborations of English language teacher and mathematics teacher are a benefit for the students to overcome the difficulties in word problems.
Comment
I agree with the idea of the collaboration between English teacher and mathematics teacher. I think many mathematics teachers who face challenges of language learners in mathematics have little information and knowledge about the supports for those students. In terms of Japanese society, research and practices of Japanese as Second Language are not widely permeated, so it is important to consider where we can obtain those resources.
One thing I tried for my students (2nd grade) is to include unnecessary information to lead the answer in word problems. For instance, “It takes 2 hours to bake one cake. You want to give one cake to 4 people each today. And tomorrow you will give it to other 3 people each. Each cake has 6 strawberries, and today is 5th May. How many cakes do you need to bake today?” Those problems with a bunch of unnecessary information got my students confused to choose appropriate information to find the targeted calculation, even though they are bilingual and might understand the meaning of each sentence. The students seem to strongly believe that there is only information they should use to solve the question in given word problems. And this phenomenon can be seen in upper grades such as secondary level, too. In addition to the linguistic challenges, learner’s experience and their characteristics might influence their performance in word problems. (As far as I remember, the study of Barwell (2005) shows the immigrant students utilize their experience out of school when coping word problems.)
Fascinating to hear how your students cope with word problems with excess, unnecessary information! This would also be a very interesting experiment to document as part of a larger study.
ReplyDeleteThere is a classic article on word problems with excess and insufficient information -- Puchalska & Semadeni, in For the Learning of Mathematics 1988. Here is a link to it (paste this in the address bar of your browser): http://flm-journal.org/Articles/75920863C36F0C75E3B54582E5C687.pdf
You might want to read this article as one of your readings this week!
I suggest you also look into the Singapore Maths 'method' of teaching the interpretation of word problems using a bar model diagram. There's a Wikipedia page on Singapore math, and many sites that offer how-to videos, etc. I would be interested in hearing your response and analysis of this method!