Linguistics challenges in the mathematical register for EFL learners: linguistic and multimodal strategies to help learners tackle mathematics word problems.

Simon Chan (2015)

The main idea of this paper is to provide tips for mathematics teachers who support EFL (English as Foreign Language) students especially for the situation those students cope word problems in English. He identifies linguistics challenges for EFL students into several categories: word, phrase, clause, discourse, and collocation and so on. The mathematics teacher, according to his suggestion, should unpack the complexity of word problems to help the students understand the situation, background condition, and targeted calculation in given word problems. Additionally, he argues that English language teachers can help the students to grasp sentences in word problems from the perspective of English acquisition, and suggest that collaborations of English language teacher and mathematics teacher are a benefit for the students to overcome the difficulties in word problems.

Comment

I agree with the idea of the collaboration between English teacher and mathematics teacher. I think many mathematics teachers who face challenges of language learners in mathematics have little information and knowledge about the supports for those students. In terms of Japanese society, research and practices of Japanese as Second Language are not widely permeated, so it is important to consider where we can obtain those resources.

   One thing I tried for my students (2^nd grade) is to include unnecessary information to lead the answer in word problems. For instance, “It takes 2 hours to bake one cake. You want to give one cake to 4 people each today. And tomorrow you will give it to other 3 people each. Each cake has 6 strawberries, and today is 5th May. How many cakes do you need to bake today?” Those problems with a bunch of unnecessary information got my students confused to choose appropriate information to find the targeted calculation, even though they are bilingual and might understand the meaning of each sentence. The students seem to strongly believe that there is only information they should use to solve the question in given word problems. And this phenomenon can be seen in upper grades such as secondary level, too. In addition to the linguistic challenges, learner’s experience and their characteristics might influence their performance in word problems. (As far as I remember, the study of Barwell (2005) shows the immigrant students utilize their experience out of school when coping word problems.)

Revisiting Early Research on Early Language and Number Names

Judit Moschkovich (2017)

This paper re-reviews previous studies that examined the correlation between language/number names and mathematics performance in general (e.g., the structure of number name in some Asian languages is intuitive for learners as the base ten structure whereas some European languages have irregular patterns: for example 11-13 are named ten-one, ten-two, and ten-three in Japanese, but they are elven, twelve, and thirteen in English), and suggests the implementation of research for relationship between language and mathematics learning/teaching in the multilingual context. The author criticizes those prior research based on the criteria introduced by Lucy (1996) and points out that the evidence in the previous research did not perfectly cover the correlation such as one between mathematics performance and number system in the specific language. Rather, he argues that mathematics outcomes should be caused by not only linguistic difference but various factors and they are intertwined. Lastly, he proposes mathematics education researchers exploring the relationship between mathematics learning/teaching and language, should not use the deficit model which examines negative features of the leaners who have culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in mathematics learning. Instead, he recommends that they focus on the contributions for mathematical thinking of those students with including multi perspectives such as language, multimodality, and multi-semiotic in mathematics.

Comments

When I heard some unique structures of number name in another language such as German, I thought it should be tough to speak for the language learners. Actually, as a non-English native speaker, I never faced difficulties which come from different number name structure when solving calculations in English (I guess I am using Japanese in my mind). However, my students in Japanese school who are bilingual speakers often miss writing numbers in Japanese characters. For example, 21 are written in 二十一 in Japanese (means two-ten-one) and the students often write 二一 (means two-one, this is incorrect because of missing ten). I am not sure this fragment comes from the students’ confusion about different number names between English and Japanese, but they never incorrectly read and operate those numbers in Japanese. Although Asian languages were focused in previous studies introduced in this paper, Singapore whose official language is English keeps showing significant outcomes in mathematics in international academic performance tests such as TIMSS. From this point, I have doubt for the idea that the type of language correlates to the speaker’s academic performance in mathematics though it might influence on mathematics learning when they are language learners.

 After I read this article, I become to be curious about problems of mathematical proof the students cope in my school. For secondary level, some problems requiring mathematical proof can often be seen in the textbook, and the students need to write the answer in the appropriate way in Japanese. In addition to the issues in their mathematical discussions and word problems, the way to proof in Japanese also can be one of their difficulties.