Richard Barwell (2001)
This study investigates the discourses of two EAL students when coping with word problems in mathematics. During the task that they create and write word problems in English, there was a transition from “typical” word problems that they see the problems as an objective view, to personal word problems that they placed themselves as a subjective role. For example, Helena, one of the participants, thought up a word problem starting with “Cynthia (another student, Helena’s partner) has fifty pounds to buy her mum a present,” and Helena firstly referred to Cynthia in the word problem as a different person from her partner. However, Helena started to call Cynthia in the word problem from “she” to “you” in the conversation with her partner, so they shift to think two Cynthia in the word problem and real life are the same person. The author argues that this transaction should be a crucial point for EAL students for their meaning making toward word problems, and it might be against the idea of the research that students hardly find the relationship between word problems in school mathematics and real life.
Comment
The task in this study that students are required to think up and write their own word problems is interesting to me. Presumably, many students might attempt to make word problems with mimicking ones they faced before in textbooks. Thus, we can find how the students see word problems in textbooks. However, in this paper, there are little findings and discussions related to features of EAL students although both types (EAL and non-EAL) of students participated this experiment. In other words, this study does not show (or clarify) the uniqueness of EAL students when dealing with the task of writing word problems. I am curious, in terms of their findings as mentioned above, about how non-EAL students worked on this task. Are there any similarities/differences between Non-EAL and EAL students?
Richard Barwell is another really important author in the language of math education (and in research on bilingual math learners). Good choice.
ReplyDeleteI like your observation that students will attempt to mimic the word problems they have already seen...and that this is interesting because it will help us find out how students see word problems! This might be an interesting exercise to try out with your students.
Way back in the 90s, there was a UBC PHD in math education on a similar topic: Ramakrishnan Menon, I believe. Aha, found his thesis on Circle UBC at https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0086383. You might want to check it out!