Bilingual Mathematics Classrooms in Wales

(Chapter 8 in Multilingualism in Mathematics Classrooms, 2009)

D. V. Jones


Wales is a cultural and linguistical diverse nation that makes the United Kingdom, and its official languages are Welsh and English. The author introduces us to mathematics classrooms and his previous works with the bilingual context in one school in the rural area in Wales which the majority of people there have little English proficiency. All students in the participating school are fluent in English while their proficiency of Welsh is varied. The students are grouped by linguistics criteria (Welsh-medium or English-medium) in the early grades of secondary school, and they are divided by their mathematics achievement in the later years. The teachers teach mathematics in both English and Welsh.
  According to the author’s findings, the teachers utilized Welsh to navigate the class while they explain in both English and Welsh to make the students understand the questions. However, they shifted to English from Welsh when mentioning about numbers or calculations. In terms of this codeswitching, the author argues that the sociocultural factor affects this phenomenon because the people who are in this district use English to refer to numbers and calculations when shopping even though they have little English proficiency. Additionally, he insists on the necessity of bilingual education in Welsh society since the Welsh language become an important language to get a job whereas there is little research about bilingual education in Welsh.

Comment

In this area (mathematics education about immigrant or bilinguals), most research was conducted in the U.S., England, Australia or Canada, so the work about Wales is new and interesting to me because this nation initially did not set English as an official language. As the author mentions in this paper, many studies support the idea that bilingual education in mathematics help mathematics learnings of language learners. For example, using home language in mathematics class influences students’ self-esteem in mathematics learning. This paper shows how the teachers use two different languages in their teaching approach with the discourse of the teacher and students.

  In terms of Japan, however, the Japanese national curriculum implicitly forbids the using of English to instruct the mathematics class. Teachers and students must rigorously follow the curriculum to attain the credits for the students. Therefore, the teachers in my Japanese school also never explain in English even though English explanations sometimes work better than Japanese for the students. Moreover, I believe their parents expect those idea (highly focusing on learning in Japanese) from the Japanese school. Which means, learning in English and learning in Japanese are acknowledged as completely different learning, and they cannot combine each other. For the students, however, learning mathematics in each language might be one learning as mathematics. For example, they can utilize the mathematical knowledge they learned in one site when they are studying in the other site. It is not clear how those students think about learning mathematics in a different language at the same time.