Language Factor: Does It Affect Children’s Performance on Word Problems?

Lawal O. Adetula (1990)


The author investigated language influence of 4^th-grade children when coping with word problems in both private and public schools in Nigeria. In Nigeria, although the pupils are instructed in English in school, some of them speak in their mother tongue (not English) at their home. The author conducted one research that the pupils were asked several word problems in both English and their native language before they were taken interviews by the author. The given word problems consisted of simple addition or subtraction problems, but they were involved “more” as a valid cue and “less” as a distractor as below.

“Which number is 6 more than 9?”
“Temilou has 15 bananas. She has 8 bananas less than Bolade. How many bananas does Bolade have?”

Children’s strategies are classified into three types: just getting down to given two numbers, “key word formula” (relying on remembering the meaning of words), analyzing the meaning of the sentence.
According to the author, the pupil’s wrong solutions to distracted problems come from the strategy of just attending two numbers or of “key word formula” but there is the difference in the strategies the students used between private and public schools. The wrong solutions of private school pupils tend to be inappropriate analyze the given statement (the third strategy).

As an English language learner, I often get confused when facing the word problems involving “more” and “less” in English. Sometimes, I can easily figure out them, but I also often stop to consider the meanings of given statements with checking the correct English grammar. In the Japanese context, there are similar problems to this phenomenon, and we call them “ordinary composition” and “inverse composition”. An ordinary composition means that “usual” statement which asks leaners to do addition/subtraction in order. (There are 3 people here, and other two people came. How many people are here). In contrast, an inverse composition indicates “unusual” statement such as “Which number is 6 more than 9?”. In the word problems involving inverse composition there are no words for addition/subtraction in the statements, instead word “become” is used to express changing the situation. As far as I know, there is little attention to this issue from the linguistic perspective. But pupils seem to need to understand the given situation focusing on what has changed.