Abstract
The main aim of the present study is to analyze the differences that may exist when students address the resolution of verbal problems in their mother tongue and in the language of instruction when these are different. We understand that knowing the type of verbal problems and their semantic structure can be helpful for students’ contextual and mathematical understanding and will allow teachers to improve instruction during the first years of elementary education in bilingual schools specialized in the area of second language acquisition as well as in CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). This study shows how children, as they are acquiring a greater command of the second language, show similar effectiveness to those students who work on mathematics in their mother tongue. This transversal study was conducted on 169 bilinguals studying in international schools. The sample was made up of 80 1st grade students (39 girls, mean age of 7.1 years and 41 boys, mean age of 7.3 years); and 89 2nd grade students (38 girls, mean age 8.2 years, and 51 boys, mean age 8.2 years). The exploratory analyses let us show how 1st grade students demonstrate lower effectiveness in solving problems when they do it in a second language, compared to 2nd grade students whose effectiveness is higher in carrying them out. It is also relevant that in first graders, the largest number of errors are found in the simplest tasks as students’ effectiveness is less when they are taught in a second language, since it takes them longer to create effective resolution models. This fact will allow us to reconsider appropriate strategies and interventions when teaching mathematics in bilingual contexts.
Highlights
During the last decades, we can observe that there are many studies that deal with the relationship between mathematics and language, and if we add to this combination other phenomena such as multilingualism, bilingualism and translanguaging, the number of studies is even larger
In order to evaluate the possible differences between the use of the language of instruction versus the use of mother tongue, the Pearson chi-square hypothesis contrast test (X2 ) was performed for each of the problems in both 1st and 2nd grades
The situation where we found more differences in one of the problems with less difficulty such as exchange problems [29,38,39,40,49,50,51,52,53,54] may be due to the fact that students using their mother tongue were more capable of creating a prepositional base text which allowed them to be able to construct problem models, while the students who solved it in a nondominant language or noncoincident language of instruction, needed more time to construct these models
Summary
We can observe that there are many studies that deal with the relationship between mathematics and language, and if we add to this combination other phenomena such as multilingualism, bilingualism and translanguaging, the number of studies is even larger. In this respect, the study conducted by the ICMI The main aim of our study is to explain how students solve mathematical problems in the first years of compulsory elementary schooling. As such tasks are formed by a large linguistic and logical component, students often have difficulty in understanding them
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