Bilingual Latino Students, Writing and Mathematics: A Case Study of Successful Teaching and Learning

(Chapter 9 in Multilingualism in Mathematics Classrooms, 2009)

K. Chaval, and L. Khisty


This article shows a case of one experienced mathematics teacher in the school which have high population of Latino students in the U.S. The authors focus her students’ writing process which the mathematics teacher emphasized in her class through a year and succeeded to improve academic achievement of the students, and they explore how the students’ writing can link to the mathematics learning and understanding and the mathematics writing in a second language were developed. According to the authors, there are three particular features in her class as below (Sara is the mathematics teacher):  (p. 135)

• Sara created a culture that valued writing in mathematics.
• Sara immersed her students in an environment filled with rich mathematical language and interactions.
• Sara created a dialogic relationship through written questions and other feedback to facilitate mathematics and language learning.

The authors argue that, for the mathematics teacher, writing is an essential tool to develop a second language and does not separate from the whole mathematics learning. She coordinates and gives the environment for the students that they can use sufficient mathematics vocabulary and active academic written and verbal interactions without reducing the complexity of the original curriculum.

Comment

In this paper, there are several written draft notes by students who are English language learners to explain the solution to given problems. The students wrote down the texts how to lead their answer. One of interesting points about their study is that they focus on writing in mathematics but not in mathematical proofs. Although there are many grammatical errors in their writing, we can see how they build their mathematical idea and use mathematics terminologies to explain their solution logically. Usually, it is really tough for teachers to know students’ idea between expressions/formulas they wrote. I often give my students writing questions to explain in the text as same as the mathematics teacher in this paper required her students to write clearly their explanation that even people who are not good at mathematics also can understand. My students seemed to be unfamiliar with those writing activities while they might think mathematics does not need language skill and those explanation questions are unusual in mathematics. Now I am wondering if they cope with the same mathematics questions and write the answers in the text in both English and Japanese, are there any differences?