Abstract

This article explores the power of language to either include or exclude certain groups of students from genuine opportunities for mathematical sense-making. The substantial increase worldwide in the number of students learning mathematics through a language other than their primary language makes this a particularly urgent issue. This paper focuses on the South African situation, where, because English is widely perceived as the language of opportunity, it is, by grade 4, overwhelmingly the chosen language of learning and teaching. The epistemological and pedagogical consequences of this choice are evidenced in the poor performance of the country’s students on national and international assessments of mathematical proficiency. Drawing on research literature around language immersion education models and the extent to which these align with certain key principles of second language acquisition, this position paper motivates for a stronger and more sustained commitment to providing students, particularly those from marginalized and vulnerable communities, with opportunities for becoming both bilingual and biliterate. Empirical data from two South African grade 4 mathematics classrooms are used to illuminate aspects of the mathematical sense-making challenges students and their teachers face without such commitment.

Highlights

  • In line with the introduction for the Special Issue on inclusive mathematics education, we examine some pedagogical and epistemological implications of mathematicsS.-A

  • The language statistics for South African classrooms we provided in an earlier subsection of this paper give clear evidence of the power of socio-political perceptions and the forces these fuel

  • We note that Models A and B are the models predominantly operating in South African classrooms, including in the two South African grade 4 mathematics classrooms we report on in the penultimate section of this paper

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Summary

Open Access

Language as an including or excluding factor in mathematics teaching and learning Sally-Ann Robertson1 & Mellony Graven. Received: 3 September 2019 / Revised: 5 November 2019 / Accepted: 19 November 2019 / Published online: 10 December 2019 # The Author(s) 2019

Introduction
Language as core to effective teaching and learning of mathematics
Inclusivity relative to classroom language
Language immersion practices in two South African mathematics classrooms
Conceptual understanding Strategic competence Adaptive reasoning Overall average
Findings
Adaptive reasoning

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