Language and Modeling Word Problems in Mathematics Among Bilinguals

Allan B. I. Bernardo (2005)

The author investigates whether the language proficiency of bilingual students in the Philippines affects how they build problem structure in word problems. He conducted a big survey which asked 111 participating 4^th-grade students to 1) complete the several given word problems that a question sentence was removed intentionally and 2) solve the question they made up. Almost half of the participants are speaking English in their home whereas others are speaking Filipino in their home.
  One of the supported ideas of solving word problems is that firstly learners grasp textual contexts form the given problems, and they build implicit problem structure to clarify what information is known/unknown, to compare given numbers, and to find relationships among the data. Lastly, students create and execute their solution depending on the above procedures. His research shows that a language factor does not relate to the modeling problem structure (more mathematically abstract part).